A season of sorrows unending -- the Cerberus Files : Outcast Races
by LogicalPremise
Summary: A collection of Cerberus documents providing insight into alien history, biology, cultures and military forces of the batarians, quarians, and krogan. Tied into my alternative universe fics (Of Sheep and Battlechicken) and quite dark. Sort of my take on Renegade Reinterpretations, except more like 'bloodthirsty lunatic reinterpretations with an axe.' M for profanity.
1. Chapter 1 : Batarian Intro

**The Cerberus Files : Outcast Races**

* * *

 **Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **PLATO-SIX-SIX-FIVE**

 **ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

Mr. Harper, Ms. Florez, Milord Williams,

Pel and I have successfully penetrated Batarian Space – not a hard task, given the recent upheaval in Citadel Space. Rumors are flying that the geth plan to invade and the batarians appear to be arming up for opportunistic raids.

We may have accidentally blown up a few batarian ships on our way in. As an aside, we found you a replacement pinnace, the property of some high-caste batarian who disagreed on price regarding some women Pel was interested in. I understand that batarian blood is removed easily with baking soda and an admixture of simple soap and water.

As Pel and I have not managed to find a reputable historical datastore yet that is not simply propaganda, Pel had the idea of presenting an overview of the batarian species. We are still in the process of determining who has to deal with each section, and I would strongly suggest having someone with an IQ higher than room temperature review most of Pel's submissions – assuming any data can be extracted from the profanity they contain.

We expect this will be quick, mainly because while Pel and I work well together and have for the past thirty years, we would still like to kill each other.

* * *

 **Cerberus Thought of the Day:** ** _–_** _warning: file not located … searching … end-of-file error 404 : file not found. CERBTEXT-TOTDTEXTHEADER missing._

* * *

 **Mindset**

Using Pel's template for an overview of the turians has proven surprisingly simple. I will begin with their mindset.

Batarians are basically predatory animals. I do not mean this in a pejorative manner – although I am no admirer of them. It is simply the most apt description. Humans and turians are predatory animals, as are asari and elcor. Volus, drell, hanar, salarians, and quarians are clearly prey animals. Krogan would seem to be predatory, but are actually prey.

I do not believe vorcha have evolved far enough to even call themselves animals.

It is a dividing line in how one sees the universe. Batarians see it as a place to hunt and take from, a place to set out a claim. The batarian does not have any time for weakness or soft emotions; they place no value on anything but the pursuit of power. Power is their entire focus – power in deed, in words, in music, in impressions, in dominance.

Aside from power, they also pursue dominance, which they see as going hand in hand with real power. I find such a link fascinating in how clearly they see what others fail to – that power you cannot use is no power at all. The turian is trapped in his own snare, the salarian experimenting himself to death, the asari watching all their vaunted culture slip through their fingers. They do not understand the nature of power, or of life and death.

It is a pity batarians are so crudely incompetent and hostile, they would make much better potential allies than the filthy asari and grotesque over-mating turians. I remain unimpressed by most aliens we have encountered, all of which die very easily and with far too much bleeding. I will give batarians credit for knowing how to die well, almost as well as humans.

Batarian 'psychology' is nothing Pel and I should really be touching, but since you have dispatched us to do so, we will do our best. As I will not tolerate Minsta's frothing for long periods of time, perhaps you could utilize the asari woman to collate such for us.

Or perhaps we could only touch on the psychology of the alien that actually matters, instead of such irrelevancies as their preferred color scheme and how their clothing indicates mental complexity. If it doesn't help me kill it, Mr. Harper, I fail to see the point in exploring it.

* * *

 **Culture**

Pel says this part is required. I will be blunt – batarian culture is dying. There is every indication that they once had a more… deep cultural background. The rise of the Emperor and the state religion of the Fist of Khar'shan and the Dark Gods have put an end to that.

The asari woman has spoken of batarian culture before, but I think most of it is just the wreckage left behind by whatever has overtaken the squints in the present day.

Culture is striated by caste and distance from Khar'shan, much as it is in human society by citizenship class, wealth, and distance from Sol. Most of it organizes around caste – different castes have different foods, different housing styles, even different outlooks on life.

Batarian males and females are highly different – in particular, the females are smaller, weaker, and barely sapient. This explains why they view females in general in such a dim light. Due to their fixation on power, batarian males apparently prefer rape to consensual sex. Revolting.

Batarian food is sustaining, but otherwise revolting. The music is very catchy. Neither Pel nor I could be bothered exploring their art for any amount of time, but we plan on killing a few artists and providing information for Trellani to pore over. Again, if it doesn't help me with the knifing, I have little interest in its pursuit.

 _UPDATE: Pel suggests he will handle the cultural aspects when the time comes for a full report. I take back my words about this being of no interest; this is liable to be vastly entertaining, given the fallout from the turian physiology report._

* * *

 **Military**

The military of the batarians is curiously bifurcated. The 'state army' is run by the government proper. It is poorly equipped, poorly led, with subpar tactical and strategic functionality. The logistics are quite good, probably better than our own, but embargoes and a lack of local industrial capacity have crippled the fleet's range and capacity. Batarian State Arms is a well-known supplier of criminally bad arms and armor, equipment not fit to hunt gasbags on Eden Prime with.

Thus, to run into the gleaming ranks of the SIU, the Fist of Khar'shan elite combat units, or the Imperial Guard is quite the shock. These units are extremely well-equipped, supremely trained, and would not be overmatched even fighting N7 NCTs or other alien special forces. Nor can the power of their manufactured biotics be overlooked. The morale and fighting style of these units is markedly different than the State armies, as are the caste makeups.

Some of the war gear and weapons used by the Imperial Guard is far beyond even asari technology – we acquired a batarian model of a point-of-impact reinforcement shield that can bounce direct hits from a Widow sniper rifle. The technology has a curious look to it, black-blue with a sheen like oil on water. The owner is obviously dead and cannot answer questions regarding its source, and I doubt other batarians would bother to aid us in this either.

Pel finds it uncomfortable, and we have stored it in storage pods outside the ship rather than utilize it ourselves. Something about the shapes of the armor and the other equipment are very subtly… wrong. Pel's instincts are rarely wrong, and I would prefer caution to reckless behavior.

Other than those anomalies, their military is reeling from our various assaults. The fleet command structure is fragmented, and the Emperor – for whatever reason – seems less concerned about keeping his fleets in good order so much as defending Khar'shan and a small number of other colonies, most of them water worlds with few landmasses. These priorities confuse me.

* * *

 **Economy**

The batarian economy is a wreck, with little development. However, the many pirate clans outside and inside Batarian Space are providing enough revenue and import/export capacity to prop the Hegemony up for now. Local industrial capacity is low and mostly focused on producing repair parts, basic medical and survival gear, clothing, and the like – very few factories are capable of producing high-tech equipment, and they have only one badly outdated shipyard.

If not for the Terminus warlords trading eezo, medical supplies, and technology for the food grown in the Hegemony, it would have collapsed by now. As long as that trade continues, however, the Hegemony will be hard to dislodge. If nothing else, every single colony they have is self-sufficient when it comes to foodstuffs and basic supplies, and batarians will not colonize planets that cannot survive on their own for long periods of time.

The batarians have endured over sixty years of an embargo – by this point, they have slowly begun to try and build up their own capacities to answer some shortages. There's also a lot of investment by Aria, P., and the Shifter out here, entire systems sold off to them for whatever they're up to. While these systems don't belong to the Hegemony, they do trade with it, and this has made the embargo less effective than it should be.

* * *

 **Intelligence**

The SIU – the Special Intervention Unit – doubles as both elite soldiers and intelligence operatives. I have a high amount of professional respect for the SIU, as they are very talented and ruthless.

Batarian views on counterintelligence work mostly rotate around capture and torture of enemy spies, which is not a comforting thought as we wallow through Batarian Space in an unarmed tramp freighter. On the other hand, the SIU's attention is more geared toward internal rebellions and STG penetration than human assaults.

I find this very curious, Mr. Harper. Either the border colonies they have lost mean nothing to them, or they don't think the SA will actually invade deeply into their space. I know our military is overtaxed, but this still seems highly arrogant… and a good opportunity that should not be wasted.

The SIU focus on thwarting the STG has made Pel curious, and he claims that if they're focused on that it means the grays have found something interesting and are trying to penetrate it. If we can identify this in our travels, we will update you further.

* * *

 **Caste**

Batarians are divided into multiple castes. The lower-caste is poor, ignorant, physically feeble and identified by gray skin, all-black eyes, and whitish teeth. They tend towards slender and do have some level of agility, but are not quite as strong as a baseline human. These are the manual laborers, cannon fodder, and slaves of the Hegemony. They do little more than breed and die for their betters, but are also the most likely to revolt.

The mid-caste, identified by sallow brown or dark tan skin tones, is the one we most commonly see in the Traverse. Larger and stronger than the gray batarians, they also have all-black eyes and whitish teeth, but a higher intelligence. These are the bulk of the military and the middle class. They have a higher aggression level than the grays, and are more inclined to look down on aliens as inferior. They are less likely to revolt, but most revolts are organized around them since the grays lack leadership ability in most cases.

The high-caste batarians are rarely seen, with golden or white skin, pure white eyes, gleaming black teeth, and a long fall of white hair in a queue trailing from their skull. The biggest and healthiest batarians, the high-caste are the rulers, officers, and wealthy among the Hegemony. They are slightly bigger and much stronger than most humans, and even the civilians train in warfare.

There is little of value in their caste system, which strikes me as inefficient and strangely out of place in their otherwise highly efficient culture.

* * *

 **The Emperor**

The highest caste is the Imperial Blood, who have deathly pale white skin, glowing white eyes, long falls of white hair, and longer, fanglike black teeth. Very few have seen Imperials or the Emperor in person, and few want to – any non-batarian who gazes on an Imperial is immediately put to death.

The Emperor does not wield absolute power in the Hegemony – his will is constrained by batarian high-caste leaders and the military – but he is increasing his control over time. What little we know about him is that the position was once highly ceremonial, and when the old democratic government collapsed in the wake of something called the Readjustments, the Emperor took power.

What bits we're getting about this person is not encouraging or reassuring. Literally every batarian is terrified of him, and he tends to react to assassination attempts by immolating entire cities or colonies. It is also curious that not a single assassination attempt so far has even managed to hurt him – common batarians hold that he is a living god, more sophisticated ones talk of strange cyberware and 'black arts.'

The Emperor travels at all times with a ceremonial standard, which is a pale white banner with the Fist of Khar'shan sigil on it, topped by a glowing orb of swirling color. We've gotten some fragmentary reports that this standard has some kind of powers – probably mystical bullshit, but we will investigate and report our findings.

* * *

 **Technology**

Batarian ground weapons are similar to human ones, relying on direct kinetic impacts through ballistic bits of metal, enhanced with various elements. Batarian sniper weapons rely on kinetic harpoons, some tipped with poisons, mechanical explosives, or corruptive nanotech. Batarians are very fond of melee combat and use special omni-gauntlets to amplify their strike power, but have no real history with melee weapons aside from the morning star and mace – edged weapons were seen as heretical or something.

Batarian space weapons often use enhanced 'multi-stage' rounds – nanotechnology or machinery to turn the final shot into something that prolongs the attack. Batarians do not use the volus M/AM missile or torpedo tech, using instead turian-style mass effect disruption torpedoes and ion-burst missile systems.

Batarian arms and armor outside of their special forces units is garbage. Most of it is inferior to some civilian turian gear. Their omni-tools and other infowar technology are badly outdated, and most haptic driven systems are falling apart due to lack of optronic components. Most armor uses carbon nanofiber weave and synthetic silk rather than the high-compression impact ceramics of asari design that the SA uses, making batarian armor more comfortable and sometimes elegantly ominous in design.

I cannot help but approve. Menace and dread are, after all, potent weapons, and one really should look the part if you're going to strike from the darkness.

On the other hand, batarians have a wide array of suppressive technology and implants that surpass our own, and have made advances into biotechnology that are very impressive. There is actually a great deal of recent batarian technology that is biotechnological in origin, a disturbing and ugly trend since I have no clue where it is coming from. We will have to examine the weapons we captured in some detail to get ideas.

* * *

 **Threat**

Low.

Honesty, Mr. Harper, it would not take much to finish off the Hegemony. Khar'shan and the core colonies are protected heavily, but three-fourths of their space is only lightly held, often full of slaves, and badly policed. Taking the batarians out in those areas would not be difficult, although dealing with the pirate and slave raids would be.

The largest threat the Hegemony offers is that it distracts the SA from larger enemies and makes our military think it is actually effective. The average State Arms unit is not even on par with some private mercenary groups in terms of tactics or equipment, and beating the batarians is similar to outsmarting the vorcha.

Easily done, but hardly impressive.


	2. Chapter 2 : Batarian History

**The Cerberus Files : Outcast Races**

* * *

 **Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **PLATO-SIX-SIX-FIVE**

 **ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

Mr. Harper, Ms. Florez, Milord Williams,

Batarian history will be a somewhat dry subject to write upon. I have attempted to be as thorough as possible, but as usual, I have a tendency to discard anything that does not bear directly on our interests.

As such, the sort of discursive musings that Minsta and Trellani are given to in their history sections will not be found here.

 **Cerberus Thought of the Day:** _– _warning: file not located … searching … end-of-file error 404: file not found. CERBTEXT-TOTDTEXTHEADER missing.__

* * *

As neither Pel nor I are scholars of anything but death, attempting to build a history of the batarians based on our own knowledge and skills seemed a useless reproduction of effort. I perused and combined several online sources for batarian history (mostly salarian, as the batarian versions are worse propaganda than anything put out by the Commissariat) and then Pel and I 'visited' a batarian historical scholar on an outlying colony world and 'persuaded' him to augment our findings.

Given what we know now about salarians, asari, and turians, it comes as no shock to me that batarian prehistory and evolutionary history shows signs of alien tampering. Indeed, most of the races of the galaxy, with the exception of the volus and elcor, show clear signs of this tampering. The interesting thing about the batarians is that there appears to have been at least two parties doing so.

A great deal of this is summarized from other sources – I have not, sadly, suddenly become an historical expert.

Prehistorical records show that Khar'shan was at some point an alien colony of a race that existed nine hundred thousand to one point three five million years ago. This colony was destroyed by heavy kinetic bombardment that wrecked the existing ecosystem and sent the planet into an ice age lasting well over forty thousand years. Much of the existing lifeforms at this period of the planet were extinguished, and the ancestor-analogue of the batarians, a scavenger primate-mammal, was among the few survivors.

Interestingly, several hundred thousand years later, the planet was used by a different alien species as either some form of nature preserve or a hunting preserve – extremely dangerous predatory animals from several different ecosystems were transplanted to Khar'shan in large numbers, along with various flora and fauna. As a result there are six different ecosystems present on the planet today, most of them settled into climactic bands.

There is clear evidence of direct tampering with the batarian proto-lifeform as far back as six hundred thousand years ago, increasing visual acuity, smell, and signs of yet another alien colony – this one simply abandoned at some point. Batarian historians have discovered little about this culture save that they also possessed four eyes. Prothean influence was also shown, at the famous Barrier Carvings made by the direct evolutionary antecedents of batarians, showing the protheans also possessed four eyes.

I'm afraid with our limited skills (and the paucity of material to work from) we cannot determine at this time just what exactly was done to the batarians, except in a few cases, mostly biological in nature and handled in a later section. The 'historical' aspect that bothers me is that most of the changes appear to be done in sequence, even when separated by gulfs of hundreds of thousands of years.

This implies a guiding hand capable of operating over timescales that dwarf even asari longevity. Such is most likely a threat if still extant.

* * *

 **Prehistory**

I will not belabor batarian evolutionary history, as much of it is so fragmentary and altered that I can see no benefit of such. Early batarian prehistory begins almost a hundred thousand years ago, with small bands of batarian males unifying to corral and dominate much larger amounts of batarian females and to pool hunting resources.

Primitive camps were set up, the nature of which is somewhat varied depending on which ecosystem the batarians in question operated in. Most were clearly defensive structures, to protect against the aggressive predator species on the planet, and built in high cave locations. In all instances, the batarian female was slower, weaker, more fragile, and less capable of defense than the male – typical deviations included the male being a third of a meter taller, with almost forty-five percent more muscle mass, heavier bones, and much better reflexes. They also had brains roughly fifteen percent larger than females.

I am sure Miranda is outraged at the enshrinement of sexual repression among batarians, but it appears to be biologically founded. It is also worth noting that many animals on Khar'shan followed the same pattern – males were stronger, smarter, bigger, and outnumbered by females. In most of the material we examined, there was never any 'native' lifeforms on Khar'shan that did not maintain 1:2 ratios of male to females as a minimum. The common belief that the males of Khar'shan somehow 'did this' to the female batarians is thus unfounded.

As such, early batarian camps were mostly packs of females doing menial labor – basic farming, food processing, and livestock keeping, while males hunted or clashed with other collectives. These early batarians had no clear leadership, and at this point the various castes were simply different races, much like early human development. The low-caste was the most numerous, living in the relatively safe and comfortable equatorial regions, with the fewest predators and easiest survival.

High-castes, on the other hand, appear to have come from the icy southern latitudes, and evolved to be much bigger and stronger due to evolutionary pressure from the predators and hard conditions. Most of the mid-castes appear to be interbreeding between the two groups.

Most of batarian prehistory is highly fragmented, based on what little we found. Part of this was no doubt due to the fact that most of our 'research' had to be done remotely via extranet, as simply walking into a high-caste batarian library would prove problematic, followed by bloody. (The mere thought of such, however, is somewhat amusing.) What we did find out points to some kind of larger scale organization of various hunting and farming groups around eleven thousand years ago, mostly organized by, surprisingly, low-caste batarians.

These early enclaves were opportunistic and based on strength of numbers, and do not mimic anything I can recall in human culture. They were not tribes, they were areas of 'holy' land that were fought over and when one group came to dominance, the surrounding groups would follow their lead for a number of years before the entire thing apparently reset based on shamanistic claptrap or some such nonsense. Highly inefficient, and wasteful of resources.

Once the ancestors of today's high-caste batarians finished butchering each other long enough to select a leader, they pretty much unified almost four thousand years ago and stormed out of the south, carving a path of bloody conquest all the way to the center of pre-civilization on Khar'shan, the Misea River, which holds a place similar to the Tigris and Euphrates on Earth. (Amusingly, both are glassed-over radioactive wastelands nowadays as well. As I said, batarians are suitably ruthless.)

* * *

 **Ancient History**

The first historical records came about as a result of high-caste rulers organizing their conquests, utilizing a system of writing that reflects the stark and cold efficiency of the batarian – it was entirely based around warfare, accounting, recordkeeping, and the like. It was not a truly written language so much as a denoting system, but for a thousand years those are the only records we have.

Batarians discovered five worked pillars of an unknown metal surrounding a vast inland sea near the beginning of this period, and the writing on them was slowly incorporated into batarian writing. The original meaning of the symbols on the Pillars of Strength is unknown – they are clearly artifacts of one of the older colonies on Khar'shan – but the high-caste batarians cleverly claimed to be able to translate them.

The first iteration of the caste system appears to be simple. Low-caste batarians were the workers, business owners, and farmers. Hunting and ranching, along with most sailing, was done by mid-caste batarians. High-caste batarians attended to warfare, medicine, writing, and religion. All records would seem to indicate a stable, mostly peaceful government consisting of leaders of each of the three castes meeting to discuss what each region would do.

Five major nations emerged from the chaos. There were also a host of minor nations, roughly twenty, but the big five were the only ones that had any real impact on history. The names are irrelevant; the main difference is that two of them rose to dominance. One was mostly dominated by high-caste batarians and embraced a more warlike and technological culture. The other was dominated by low-caste batarians and put more effort into food production, breeding, and mining. When the two nations made an alliance, the other three were alarmed and began to fight.

The war raged on for a good three hundred years before the emergence of a powerful, high-caste batarian who was some form of holy hermit living on a singular island in the middle of the inland sea bordered by the Pillars. Calling himself the Watcher of the Deep, this batarian was somehow able to, in less than ten years, advance the small group of batarians who followed him from crude bronze maces and mail to worked high-quality steel, gunpowder, and primitive gliders.

I have consulted with Minsta and Trellani on this – this level of advancement is anomalous for many reasons. Not only is there no record of experimenting with any of these things, but some of the drawings, artwork, and recovered artifacts of that era show that the development itself was strange. For example, the glider design only required wood, hides, and strings to bind it together, but somehow utilized advanced wing shapes that incorporated chaotic lift patterns only capable of being modeled by semi-modern computers – humanity didn't discover these concepts until the 1980s, after decades of heavy experimentation with powered flight.

Likewise, their formula for gunpowder skipped the usual steps of large corning and granular foundations to move directly to cased rounds that were breech loaded. My conclusion is that this Watcher of the Deep somehow managed to stumble onto a cache of documents or perhaps some ancient VI that managed to communicate these concepts.

Doctor Minsta disagrees, noting that the Watcher also displayed anomalous abilities, assuming one believes superstitious fiction. Supposedly, the Watcher could not be killed by conventional weapons, the 'fibers of the waters' rejuvenating him. Also, in mythology, he walked through raging flames to rescue six batarian chieftains, after which they said he was blessed by the God of the Pillars.

I strongly suspect this is all obfuscation, inserted by later Emperors to boost their lineage's designs. There is fragmentary evidence that the five nations collapsed shortly after his ascendance, but what is known is that twenty-two hundred years ago, the First Batarian Emperor took power.

* * *

 **Old Imperial Era**

Conventional modern history (or what the batarians consider such) starts around the time the Emperor crushed the five nations. The Emperor set out a model of governance that is still loosely followed to this day.

The Emperor organized the caste system more firmly, subjugating the lower-caste batarians and employing the mid and upper-caste batarians into new roles. Low-castes continued to work, but took over labor-intensive tasks such as ranching and the garrison roles of the military. Mid-caste batarians became managers, maintained control of the blue-water navy, and took up the lower ranks of government and business, while high-caste batarians became military officers, priests, business owners, and the like.

The entire government was run by councils of high-caste batarians, each one organized into crude, but efficient, cell networks. Outlying cells (villages, small towns, etc.) answered to a more centralized cell, and so on and so forth until the four most powerful high-caste batarians answered to a figure known as the Hegemon.

The Hegemon was a military position, much like a Japanese Shogun. He managed the government and military, but got all his funding from the Emperor, who was the only one who could levy taxes and controlled the treasury. The Emperor also retained ultimate control of religion and landownership.

Outlying batarian nations banded together to fight the Emperor and were crushed underfoot. Leaders were executed via torture and their families burned alive, regardless of whether they surrendered or not. After the first few small nations crumbled, the Emperor ordered any batarian who did not immediately surrender and swear eternal loyalty to be butchered.

Six nations surrendered immediately, but two defied the Emperor. In seven months, he had the Hegemon raze those nations and put every single living batarian within them to the sword, before he had the leaders cooked alive and ate them. (Cannibalism was a horrible insult in batarian culture, especially eating the eyes – while gruesome, it does have a certain weight of the message it sends.)

After this savagery, no extant batarian organizations or forces stood to resist the Emperor's rule. He turned his energies to expanding his line, and legend claims he sired over a thousand offspring. He died barely ten years after founding his empire, leaving detailed instructions of how his line should pass down. His oldest male child was taken by blinded priests to the waters of the Pillars Lake, and again superstitious claptrap abounds – he was gifted with some magical staff, glowing with lights and other such nonsense.

The next three hundred years was mostly marked by the nascent Hegemony advancing the technology levels of the planet, and further organizing their culture. At this time, slavery was still not a thing – while one could argue the lower-castes were somewhat oppressed, they were not considered 'low' at this time, merely different.

The situation was more fluid, as there were no traditions or rules against inter-caste intermarriage, which resulted in the subtle subclasses of the mid-caste batarians. They fully entered an industrial era about seventeen hundred years ago.

* * *

 **Rise of the Hegemon**

At this point, the Hegemon began taking more of an active part in batarian lifestyles and cultures, due to a series of revolts by low-caste batarians to protest hard taxes on their farms. The Emperor at the time was so obsessed with producing more offspring that he took no actions to stop the revolt, so the Hegemon authorized a military response. This in turn seemed to have instigated a larger revolt, and instead of attempting to rein in the conflict, the Hegemon used it to gather more power.

Eventually the revolt was put down brutally, but the fighting killed more than a few high and mid-caste batarians. Racial tensions began building as some low-caste batarians began to resent the way the high-caste was behaving, and a second revolt began not ten years later, this one much larger than the first.

The Hegemon did not even consult the Emperor this time, having begun using the high-caste to fund his military forces without a direct dependency on the Emperor. Freed of that shackle, he began all-out war over the surface of Khar'shan, using naval battleships, artillery, and other heavy weapons on civilian populations.

The resulting conflict destroyed seven cities before the Emperor attempted to rein the Hegemon in and found he could not. The Hegemon stated the Emperor's power should be limited to religious and ceremonial matters, and the armies agreed with him, being mostly composed of mid-caste batarians at this point, who felt the Hegemon gave them more respect than the Emperor did. (The ability of batarians to be so easily manipulated by issues of pride, power, and status is a weakness that should be noted.)

At the end of this conflict, the low-caste was formally stripped of any rights, due to their 'violent inclinations.' Ghettoized and having property taken from them, the first signs of slavery were visible at this point, a natural extension of the batarian hunger for power over others. The next five hundred years saw these trends continuing as technology slowly advanced – the low-caste were made into menial laborers and cannon fodder, the mid-caste slowly moved into business and officer positions in the military, also taking up more scientific pursuits, while the high-caste maintained all leadership roles and moved more into financial affairs, art, and especially music.

The musical revolution of batarian culture started at this time, as the high-caste found ways to amuse themselves other than whipping low-caste slaves to death. As I said before, it can be very catchy. Most other batarian arts and culture from this time and later is boringly monospecific to themes of power and dominance.

* * *

 **Space and Beyond**

The explosive growth of the Hegemony stalled as natural resources began to run low. Khar'shan boasted vast amounts of water, ice, wood, copper, and a coal-like substance, but very little else. High-caste scientists exploring the solar system with instrumentation determined the asteroid belt in the system was rich in all manner of minerals, and eight hundred years ago, they began attempting to find ways to reach said minerals.

Notably, their program of exploration did not begin with powered avionics. Batarians had focused entirely on glider-style unpowered flight and zeppelin-like craft, but did not apply the concept of engines or airfoils to air travel. As such they began experimenting with primitive rocketry, eventually leading up to a series of unmanned probes and from there, unmanned spaceships.

It took them two hundred years to build automated mining ships that would fly out to the asteroids, break down small ones, load them into cargo bays, return to Khar'shan, aerobrake, and use massive parachute arrays to land. After almost thirty years of this they had enough resources to begin experimenting with manned flights, leading up to a six-year-long exploration of their nearest planet.

Wrecked on the planet was a badly damaged prothean warship, which included a highly damaged and partially malfunctional VI system. The engines were mostly intact, and the ship had a large store of eezo on board, allowing batarians to begin experimenting with modern travel concepts. However, it was only three hundred years ago that they finally built their first primitive ships and achieved FTL-travel, coming across a mass relay in a system next to theirs and beginning to explore the mass relays.

Early exploration efforts focused solely on finding colonizable worlds. The Emperor sought out water worlds, while the Hegemon explored mineral-rich worlds regardless of habitability. One thing the batarians always did was ensure each colony had enough air, water, and food production to ensure the survival of all colonists if cut-off from the homeworld, a paranoid tactic that would pay off handsomely in later years.

The Hegemon gathered additional power, eventually engaging in expanding their ranks. All Hegemon were sourced from a handful of families, rotating power in a roughly circular arrangement and intermarrying with Imperial lesser sons when needed. Eventually they became a sub-caste of their own, the Hegemon-caste, ranking even above that of the high-caste.

The mid-caste also intermingled a bit with the high-caste, here and there, leading to a bifurcation of the mid-caste into 'low-mid' and 'mid-high,' a subtle, but apparently important, separating line.

The stresses of accelerating their technology and expanding so fast seemingly resulted in a collapse of much of batarian culture. Increasingly, the castes became highly isolated from one another, and the low-caste batarians were treated more and more harshly as raw labor and dangerous industries such as eezo mining and He-3 refining needed disposable workers. Slavery, once restricted to criminals, became the punishment for anything from criminal offenses to falling into too much debt, and the Hegemon relied increasingly on elite military forces to suppress revolt after revolt.

The Fist of Khar'shan, the batarian equivalent of the _Solguard_ , dates from this time, as does the Special Intervention Unit. Ostensibly, the Fist answered to the Hegemon personally, while the SIU answered to batarian military command. In reality, politics ensured only high-caste of families in the Hegemon's good graces became admirals.

The Imperial family had grown so large over the years that it was basically a caste unto itself. The batarians had always been playing with biotechnology, and in the years before their discovery of other life, began further modifying their forms. The strange appearance of high, Hegemon, and Imperial-caste batarians, with chalk-white skin and pale eyes, stems from this period, some form of viral therapy done as a coming of age ritual.

* * *

 **Citadel Interactions**

Given the batarian location on the edge of Citadel Space, it didn't take long for the batarians to stumble into aliens. However, their first contacts were not with the Citadel races directly, but the pirates and criminal elements of the Traverse – namely, Aria and her warlords.

The Hegemony proved more than capable of holding its own with such trash, and provided a burgeoning market for Aria's businesses, who sold them all manner of ships, weapons systems, drugs, technology, and eezo in exchange for raw resources the outer worlds lacked – especially luxury items, woods, and water.

Batarian slaver rings, fascinated by asari females, began working almost immediately. As did batarian efforts to study biotics. As they expanded, many batarian low-caste types fled the Hegemony, joining Aria and other warlords as pirates, mercenaries, and the like. By the time the STG realized there was a new player in galactic politics, the Hegemony had taken possession of some one hundred worlds and was building the second generation of their war fleet with the technology achieved from working with Aria.

Citadel relations with the batarians were never smooth, as the batarians resented the idea that they were not the most powerful, important, and strongest species in space. They clashed repeatedly with the turians, almost always losing such fights, and their predation on asari colonies eventually drew the ire of the justicars, who turned three colonies into charnel houses as retribution.

The Hegemon was shamed by such hits to his pride, and at this point the Emperor apparently took action. Having carefully built up his funds and slowly grown a selection of strong warriors from his own Imperial-caste ranks, the Imperial Guard made its appearance by storming the Hegemon Tower and executing the Hegemon for cowardice and incompetence.

The military hesitated, and the Emperor selected a new Hegemon from one of the usual families, with a stern warning that he would no longer tolerate their independence if they could not stop aliens from shaming the race. The Imperial Guard used weapons and armor far more advanced than anything even the Fist had access to, and there wasn't any known source for this material. Left with no other choice but compliance, the Hegemon obeyed.

From that point on, revolts were treated as personal insults to the Emperor, and he responded with utmost brutality, orbital bombardments followed by storming the planets and slaughtering and raping the inhabitants. This had the result of drawing condemnation from Citadel observers, which he had shot and sent back to the Citadel with a note snidely noting he did not comment on the actions taken by the asari Nightwind and salarian STG, and would appreciate the same courtesy.

Despite several more skirmishes and conflicts, the Council was trying very hard to find some level of accommodation with the Hegemony. If they could stabilize the region, Aria would be isolated and prevented from grabbing any more systems. They labored under the misconception that the batarians would eventually attack her, not realizing the Emperor actually admired Aria for being a 'mere woman' and yet capable of holding her own, and that the two empires were working together closely.

* * *

 **The War with Humanity**

In the aftermath of the First Contact War, the batarians were, amusingly, at first strong supporters of humanity. Disgusted by the female-dominated asari and salarians, and not liking the turians for many reasons, humans seemed at least palatable to batarians, with similar views on war, music, and power.

Unfortunately, the decision of the Alliance to attempt to colonize the Skyllian Verge led to direct conflict between our species and theirs. Batarian slaver rings attacking outlying colonies also infuriated the Alliance, and several vicious clashes between Alliance forces and Hegemony ships made the Citadel cringe.

When humanity crushed the batarian attack at Veridian, the Hegemon decided to take action, traveling to the Citadel and asking for the Council to declare the Verge an area of batarian interest. The Council basically laughed him out of the room, stating they had no reason to do so given batarian slavery, hostility, and lack of willingness to compromise.

The Emperor, upon hearing this, withdrew the Hegemony from the Citadel Accords and instructed the Hegemon to destroy the Alliance. The opening salvo of that attempt, the First Raid on Mindoir, was broken and crushed by the acts of Major Kyle, resulting in the 2nd Fleet pinning and destroying the batarian Imperial 1st Fleet outside Mindoir and sending them running.

Since then there has been constant sniping, raids, and minor assaults, with major blowups like Torfan and Elysium coming few and far between. The months prior to the Eden Prime debacle saw a decrease in hostility somewhat, as the Emperor began focusing his efforts on reinforcing defenses around the center of the Hegemony and neglecting the outer rims, leaving the Hegemon scrambling to react.

* * *

 **Conclusions**

Minsta and Trellani seem content to simply present history as if it were some confection to be admired. As I am more focused on how to utilize knowledge than merely gather it, I will make an attempt to draw some useful dicta from the above.

First, batarians are modified. The possibility that a party has been modifying them over vast spans of time is troubling and implies a long-term plan. While I initially discounted any supernatural abilities or tales of the Emperors, such may have some kernels of truth if long-lived aliens are providing them with assistance.

Second, batarian history shows a repeated cycle of abuse, revolt, repression, and power grabs. The balance of power between Hegemon and Emperor seems based on how much attention the Emperor pays to events – recent actions by the Emperor may mean they are going to become reclusive again, and the Hegemon will retake power. I am uncertain if this is good or bad – the Hegemon tends to focus internally, the Emperor likes taking on external issues and threats.

Third, batarian history shows us that until fairly recently, slavery and caste oppression were not elements of the culture. What exactly led to this being not only taken up, but accepted is still unknown. It seems unlikely they could go from basically working together to the current state of affairs without some driving reason behind it, but I am not seeing anything that would point to such.

As always, when we have unanswered questions the best solution is to solve as much of the equation as possible. There are only two possibilities – such oppression is a result of batarian morality and cultural psychology changing over time, or such oppression is being caused by external factors, such as the possible influence of some alien races.

Neither possibility is good. If the batarians are becoming more savage and brutal over time rather than less, that flies in the face of what little I know about cultural development and suggests they will face a collapse at some point in the future. While on paper that may sound attractive, it would strengthen Aria and the Traverse warlords greatly, and they are difficult to deal with and almost as strong as the Alliance already.

If this change is due to alien influence, the immediate question is why and the only possible answer is 'someone is building an army that will not hesitate to commit atrocity.' Given the batarian taste for such things, the truly ugly question then becomes who will the batarians be aimed at?

Pel is reviewing batarian psychology with Doctor Minsta. His report should be coming shortly, assuming the fool can produce anything coherent and that Minsta can decipher anything from the morass of profanity sure to be included. I will remain in contact via TTG if you have questions regarding this report.


	3. Chapter 3 : Batarian Physiology

**A/N:** _Honestly, there's just not a lot to write about this._

* * *

 **The Cerberus Files : Outcast Races**

* * *

 **Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE**

 **ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

Lovely Jack, careful Rachel, and grumpy Richard,

I am amused that I have been brought into the current work on batarians, but Dr. Minsta is once again occupied with the recoveries from Feros. Shepard did a very thorough job in destroying the creature, an outcome that, while a setback for your people, is probably for the best in the long run. Concealing such a thing from the STG and other groups would have become more and more difficult as time went on. The worst storms are those that come upon you far from any shore, after all.

Given that the good doctor is otherwise engaged, and that Pel is entertaining himself with slave women, I engaged the services of Kai Leng to gather information regarding batarian physiology and attempted, with some resources and a few questions to Miranda, to produce something useful. As I have previously stated, I am not a medical professional – and the various mysteries of the batarian body, I fear, do not suffer easy exploration.

I am aware this amount of information is somewhat sparse. However, obtaining additional details would require additional capture of subjects, something that Kai Leng has advised is not recommended given the already dangerous situation he and Pel are in while wandering Batarian Space. Furthermore, the batarian is, in many ways, a simpler lifeform than the asari or human or even turian.

 **Cerberus Thought of the Day:** _The alien is different and strange – that which seems familiar about them is merely the human mind attempting to find patterns where there is only vileness. Resist this impulse, to identify is to sympathize, and that leads to destruction._

* * *

 **Batarian Basic Physiology**

Kai Leng's notes are a marvel of cool organization and disdainful, sneering commentary, but he is at least proficient in detaching his opinions and beliefs from the data he submits. He provides a useful backstop in methods to make what I write more tolerable – or perhaps, more understandable – to the human mind.

Drawing upon his opening, he posits that most intelligent races can be traced back to a single ancestral animal species. Humans evolved from primate types, asari from seagoing mammalians, salarians from an amphibious scavenger with lizard-like attributes, and so forth. The batarians appear to be the result of two closely related predatory animals that I can only describe as a mix between a Terran gorilla and a Sur'Keshi salt tiger.

The batarian body layout seems, at first glance, to be similar to that of humans and asari, but in actuality is far different. There are large differences in size, build, skeletal, muscular, and nervous systems between castes, but I will start with the basics all batarian forms share.

Batarians have two arms and legs, with similar jointing and ranges of motion as humans and asari, although with wide tolerances for joints.

The batarian is 'cool-blooded,' a semi-endothermic being. They do not have hearts; instead a series of powerful muscular pumps filters blood through organs in the chest that cleanse poisons and fatigue waste and then pushes it through thin sheets of membranous material in four arching pods along the back. These pods are filled with various glands that pump the blood full of nutrients, before pushing it through a second level of membranes that allow the blood to express waste gasses and intake oxygen.

Toxins, wastes, and other things that do not belong in blood also pass through filtration organs studded through the body and are deposited into a pouch that discharges waste through the rectum.

Batarian digestion is equally different – the teeth are used mostly for ripping and tearing meat, but the tube that leads to the stomach is lined by strong pods of acid and muscular tubes lined with grinding bone plates that mash the food. The stomach breaks down all meat materials using an adaptive colony of some form of bacteria that attack proteins, allowing batarians to digest food rapidly. They can intake some plant matter, but the only types they eat are various spicy chili peppers and grains reduced to pastes – anything else, in particular heavy cellulose, will induce vomiting.

The batarian skeletal system is also strange – the bones are made of a material more similar to keratin laced with copper than the osseous material found in salarian, human, asari, and turian bodies. Large portions of the skeleton are actually cartilaginous, with erectile tissue 'rods' in the middle of the bone to provide stability when needed and flexibility on demand – this appears to be an involuntary nervous process. This means that a batarian is very nearly immune to heavy physics shocks, high g-forces, and strong impacts or explosive concussion.

Blood production is not sourced in the bones, but in more membranes near the center of major muscle groups, fed by capillary-type vessels that link to a sort of secondary circulatory system that provides secondary nutrients and immune system function. The immune system has striking similarity to the human and asari immune system, with a lymphatic system almost identical in function if not chemical operation.

Batarian skin is seven layers thick; the top three are functionally dead and take on a texture much like hardened leather. Across the chest, stomach, back, thighs, and forearms it is stiffened with sub-dermal plates of keratin to stop impact damage and clawing penetration. It will not stop modern weapons or even a good knife, but it does make hand-to-hand combat more difficult.

Low-caste batarians have smaller, leaner muscle groups, a higher concentration of nerve cells in the spinal area and body, smaller brain masses, and higher metabolisms. High-caste types are roughly half a meter taller than low-caste types, with a much more robust, burst-style heavy musculature, more robust skeletonization, larger brains, more 'blood pumps,' and relatively lower metabolisms, but higher neural development.

Skin color in low-caste types is varied between dark to light gray, or very dark brown. Mid-castes shade from dark brown to golden brown, high-castes from very light brown to a pale beige-white. Only the Imperials have stark, dead-white skin. This appears, based on tissue samples, to be done via viral therapy just after birth – most Imperials would naturally have the same skin tones as high-caste batarians.

Batarian blood-oxygen levels are almost four times that of even asari, giving them tremendous endurance and the ability to run and fight for days without feeling fatigue. Unlike asari and human muscles, batarian muscles do not tear and rebuild stronger – muscle strength is solely a function of nutrition. As long as a batarian remains active and eats well, their bodies slowly get stronger and more powerful from late adolescence to middle age, at which point this trend begins reversing itself.

Batarians have three fingers and an opposable thumb, and their muscles, like asari muscles, work in triads rather than the human or turian pairs. Batarian blood is iron-based and hemoglobin performs the same function for them as does human blood, making your two races the only ones with reddish blood. However, batarian blood vessels run deeper under the dead layers of surface skin, and thus do not affect skin coloration – unlike asari and humans, they do not blush or grow pale.

* * *

 **Batarian Senses**

Batarians' most noted feature, of course, would be their four eyes. The eyes work in tandem and the batarian brain devotes a good fifth of its mass merely to interpreting visual input. Batarian vision is exceedingly good in low-light conditions, superior even to salarian vision, but is roughly on par with human or asari vision in normal lighting conditions.

Batarians cannot see in any exotic spectra, but their four eyes mean they are extremely accurate at judging distance and parallax, and are masterful at mid-range shooting.

Batarian hearing is done via fluid-filled cavities to either side of the jaw and is not very sensitive. Batarian smell is nearly as keen as salarian, with the many folds of the nasal membrane each focusing on different kinds of scent. Batarians can identify scent much better than most races, and it seems to play a large role culturally.

Batarian taste seems to be roughly baseline, although they prefer spicier foods, so it is difficult to be sure. Mr. Leng's notes on this proved remarkably unhelpful.

The most significant variation in batarian senses is their sense of touch and feel. Batarians do not feel much pain, and are quite capable of suppressing it at will. Related to this, their biotics, due to the methods we suspect they are created with, are almost immune to most pain. Even the most grievous blow that would incapacitate a normal person would only make them flinch or roar in anger.

The batarian has a very keen sense of balance, in some ways superior to a salarian, and they are rarely capable of being disoriented or lost. Batarian skin also has a very fine, almost invisible layer of cilia that grows through the surface of the dead skin cell layers that allows them to judge wind direction (or fresh air in enclosed spaces) very finely.

* * *

 **Batarian Sexual Organs and Reproduction**

Batarian males possess a quartet of organs similar to human, krogan, and turian testicles, located in a sac between the legs. As with humans and krogan, this area is extremely vulnerable to kicks, although not as incapacitating as it is to krogan and human males.

Male batarians possess an erectile penis similar to humans, although (like turians) it does not double as a source of waste excretion.

Female batarians have multiple ovaries, between two and six – the number appears nearly random. Almost twenty percent of the female's core body mass is given over to a heavily integrated womb that can regularly support triplets and quadruplets.

Unlike humans, turians, drell, quarians, and krogan, sexual release is only a minor pleasure for a male. Kai Leng was unable to determine if the female enjoyed it or not – some appeared to, others merely appeared confused. The dire situation of the batarian female is saddening to me, but it is the course of biology and little can be done to change their plight.

Batarian mothers bear live young, but nurse from small nipples found on the belly – they do not possess mammary glands like humans, asari, and quarians do. (Although to be fair, quarian 'breasts' are more a thin layer of fat over a curious bowed rib cage that seems to have much the same shape as human and asari breasts).

Most batarian reproduction is done, as Leng's notes indicate, based on monthly heats of the female, she is not fertile when not in heat. Batarians are relatively impotent, as only fifteen percent of implantations of a fertile egg result in zygote production – this explains why, even though batarian females are constantly having sex, pregnancy rates are even lower than that of humans or quarians. Lower-castes appear more fertile than upper-castes.

Batarian pregnancy lasts seven months, and is very draining on the mother, especially with multiple offspring, as the womb cannibalizes the mother's body to provide nutrients for the children growing within her. No batarian female has survived to give birth to more than four children at once, and two back-to-back pregnancies with more than one child are very likely to kill the mother. The low fertility rate may help to offset this.

* * *

 **Batarian Strengths and Weaknesses**

Mr. Leng has a rather depressing fixation on finding 'utility' in what he has researched, as if simply knowing more about an enemy is not enough unless the man can find some way to murder them in the most appalling possible fashions.

I worry about him, at times – he seems rather unstable, and anyone who utilizes that much sarcasm is clearly only a few bad tides away from some sort of incident involving far too many knives to think about.

Regardless, he made a few salient points on the weakness of batarians which bear further scrutiny.

A batarian cannot be instantly killed by anything aside from headshots. They are very dissimilar from most races in that they do not really possess much in the way of complicated internal organs. They have no kidneys or liver, their digestive and circulatory system is so distributed any attack that destroys more than a small portion of it will, by force, obliterate the majority of the batarian, and their respiratory system is also difficult to damage directly.

Batarian blood filtering means most poisons and toxins take a great deal of time to effect the batarian, or fail to do so at all.

Batarians are resistant to blood loss, and burns must be very hot and deep to do any real damage. Most stun weapons (aside from neural maces) are worthless. Encased in thick armor and with a resistance to pain, most batarians require heavy weapons to drop quickly. This is one reason why even the substandard State Guard and pirate forces are difficult to eradicate.

The drawback of the batarian system is they require twice as much water as a human does, and do not build much in the way of fat reserves, meaning that without regular food they quickly starve, as their bodies cannibalizes muscle tissue for energy. This is probably why they have so much focus on colonizing worlds with abundant water, and ensure all planets grow enough food to feed themselves.

The skeleton provides resistance to physics shocks, and makes grapples and throws difficult to execute, but means they are overall poor martial artists and do not handle hard, crushing blows as well as they could. The bones will not break, but they will also be a hindrance on higher-g planets.

Aside from food and water intake, the highest batarian vulnerability is their sight and smell – weapons that attack either one are far more efficacious, and the clever thinking of your Major Kyle on Mindoir of using pepper spray on the batarians was fiendishly effective.

* * *

 **Batarian Lifespan**

Batarian males live roughly eighty years, slightly longer for higher-castes. Females age rapidly past puberty and rarely live longer than thirty-five years.

The batarian body peaks around forty years of age, and becomes markedly weaker at around sixty-five – a good forty percent of the male population does not live to see seventy.

As could be expected from these people, infant mortality varies highly based on caste and sex – from a high of thirty-four percent mortality for female low-caste babies to a low of three percent for male high-caste. Multiple pregnancies over a short period of time rapidly weaken batarian females, and they can literally be impregnated to death in as little as six years and five pregnancies.

Gathering hard data on the lifespans of the Imperial-caste is almost impossible, but Mr. Leng was able to deduce, from historical announcements of births and deaths, that most Emperors live markedly shorter lifespans than other batarians – once they take the throne, every single Emperor has died within fifteen to twenty years, and most take the throne while in their twenties – an anomaly, to be sure.

* * *

 **Batarian Diseases**

Given the strong immune system of batarians, most diseases upon Khar'shan are actually driven by opportunistic parasites rather than viral or bacterial sources. The most common diseases are part of a family of worm-like parasites charmingly referred to as 'slop rot,' which is transmitted sexually or via cannibalism.

A number of brain disorders from neural misfolded prions have been noted, resulting in insanity, bodily mutilation, and the like among batarians who regularly engage in cannibalism. Some bacterial infections of the nasal linings, the lung-analogues, and the skin also occur.

Cancers are rare, but one stands out – Girifon's Disease, a mutational cancer of the nervous system that results in out of control nervous tissue growth. While the entirety of the process behind making batarian biotics is not fully understood, what is known is that this mutation is the baseline for it. Most batarians are artificially inflicted with this disorder, but the so-called 'Glorious' batarians tend to be naturally suffering the disease and have it augmented to grotesque levels by batarian authorities.

Due to incompatible enzymes and a blood barrier, no known human or asari diseases affect batarians.

* * *

 **Batarian Modifications**

As a rule, batarians tend to see themselves as living in physical perfection, and avoid cybernetic enhancement unless absolutely necessary. Most batarians see such things as a sign of weakness.

On the other hand, bio-modification is popular, especially to boost muscle size and strength or enhance height. Batarian growth hormones are taken by an estimated fifty-seven percent of the populace, and are the most common marketed biotech product that slips past the embargo into Batarian Space.

Batarians will not accept any form of modification, biological or technological, to the eyes. The loss of an eye, except in certain sanctioned events or as a deliberate sacrifice to the Dark Gods, is seen as a bad omen – a batarian who loses more than one eye is often shunned as bad luck. Batarians will not accept cloned eyes, and cybernetic eye replacements are viewed with shuddering horror by all batarians.


	4. Chapter 4 : Batarian Psychology

**The Cerberus Files : Outcast Races**

* * *

 **Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **DAEDALUS-SEVEN-NINE-TWO**

 **ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

To the Three:

As can be expected, batarian psychology should come with a warning label. The below is likely to be distressing to read.

Given the debacle that occurred from allowing Pel to write up the physiology section of the turians, I decided to merely take whatever Pel was able to come up with and attempt to refine it into something, if not doctorate-level, at least legible and informational.

Then again, given that we are talking about a pack of savages who eat each other, rape their women, and don't compare favorably to even krogan in terms of ability to coexist with other races, perhaps Pel would have been the better choice. No matter.

-Dr. Galen Minsta

 **Cerberus Thought of the Day:** _Only the fool expects the alien's outstretched arm to hold anything but a knife._

* * *

Despite Trellani's distaste for Maslow, I will continue to use it, as I prefer familiar human perspectives when dealing with highly alien cultures.

 **A Note: Batarian Female Psychology**

The hierarchy of needs of batarians is highly skewed, and before I even begin, a topic must be touched on that will no doubt be distasteful to the ladies who read this.

Namely, batarian females.

Keep in mind that the vast bulk of this report will be written in regards to batarian males. The female, by all accounts, operates at the rough level, mentally, of a very small child, perhaps a four-year-old. They can comprehend speech, and the more intelligent ones can read and write at a very basic level. That's about it.

Batarian female psychology is comprised mainly of chemical urges to mate, cluster with other females, and seek out a strong male. I'm aware the demeaning nature of this is not comfortable for most females of any race to deal with, but there it is.

I've made an attempt, based on the data Pel has gathered and my own researches, to validate the claims made by Mr. Leng regarding the female always being this way, and I believe him to be correct. Asari did a series of studies on recovered batarian females raised from birth and they did not demonstrate any intellectual capacity above that of other batarian females.

It is worth noting that low-caste females are slightly more reactive and smarter than high-caste females. Perhaps this is merely caused by a much tougher lifestyle, or other factors – we have not been able to sample living high-caste females as they are kept under tight guard mostly on the inner worlds of the Hegemony.

I touch on other aspects of batarian female psychology where important – be aware, none of them are pleasant. We should set this entire species afire; they do not even measure up to fucking vorcha in some areas of basic decency.

* * *

 **Batarian Psychological Basics**

The hierarchy of needs for batarians is one that will no doubt revolt any human reading it. Like humans, the base of the pyramid is base survival – albeit with a barbaric twist. Batarians primarily associate survival with food, shelter, and physical power – a weak batarian cannot defend himself from predators or other batarians and is seen as prey. It is why you never see a fat or weak batarian – the entire race sees physical prowess and fitness in almost as high a light as humans would view physical beauty.

In this fashion, it is a mix of needs of survival and the safety imperative of humans, but 'survival' takes on ominous (or barbaric) overtones considering what batarians feel is the minimum requirements for living. Plainly put, a batarian who has to choose between sacrificing his sense of well-being in terms of secure food and shelter or his sense of physical safety will almost always choose the latter, whereas humans repeatedly have shown they will put up with abuse and even torture if they are at least kept alive and fed.

It is this facet of the batarian mind that makes them so unwilling to compromise. They only surrender when their own sense of strength and power is utterly destroyed by what they face. Until that point their fear of being powerless will often overcome their fear of death, making them fierce fighters. This is markedly weaker in lower-caste types (with less to lose) and almost indomitable in higher-castes.

Above the base of the pyramid comes the need for dominance. Most batarians satisfy this by dominating their wives. It gives validation and self-worth to a batarian to be able to do so, and the more powerful the figure or figures he can dominate, the more powerful he must be in turn, both in his own mind and in the views of other batarians.

The batarians have over sixty words for dominance and positioning of social status, many evolved from combative words such as fist, mace, and fire. A batarian forcing his wife to perform sexually until she is a bleeding ruin does not do so out of cruelty, or even sadism. He does so because it is the ultimate method of showing he is worthy to force that level of submission, freely given or not.

It is a sickening fact that batarian females crave abuse as a form of attention. The stories of horrifying 'rape contests' and the like are not wild exaggerations, but ugly, vicious fact. A batarian female's only worth is if she is used by a male – if not, she is merely another worthless mouth to feed, one that serves no real purpose. In older times this was not the case – they were used for manual labor, farming, and the like – but in modern society there is very little need for purely physical labor, and a female cannot handle much beyond that.

This is only exasperated by the amount of slaves taken by batarian society, leaving a batarian female competing with more 'interesting' female subjects. Still, batarian males always prefer dominating female batarians over all other forms of life except other male batarians.

There is no sexual aspect in dominance between two male batarians, although unlike turians they do have a homosexual subculture in certain mid-caste groupings, mostly musicians and artists. Batarians who dominate other batarians do so by a mix of physical prowess, vocal capacity, and sheer brutality. A batarian who never hesitates is seen as a fool, but one who is cautious is seen as a coward, their leaders tread a fine line between audacity and caution.

Above this level of the pyramid of needs comes something akin to human self-actualization. A batarian who is safe, secure, and dominant in at least some aspect of his life can feel comfortable enough to begin considering his place in greater society. It is curious that before humans can feel this, they require self-esteem and love or belonging to a larger group – batarians do not. They do not even actually have a word for self-esteem, it is something each and every batarian takes for granted – that they are important, that they are destined for something.

As they reach a level where they have handled their basic business, this becomes more and more prevalent in their minds. Batarians will demonstrate great willingness to endure hardship to achieve these self-actualized goals, whatever they may be. For many batarians, it is wealth and the envy and jealousy of peers. For artistic batarians it is the attention and acclaim of their social betters. For low-caste batarians, it often becomes the acquisition of a number of wives – proof that he can sustain a large family.

In all levels of batarian society, they warp their whole lives around achieving this goal, and then set another and another, until they either draw the ire of some other batarian and are smashed down, or begin to feel as if they cannot fail to succeed at whatever they turn their minds to.

It is at this level that the next level of the hierarchy of needs kicks in, a strong need to define a lasting legacy. Batarians will always embrace large families, but batarians at this level will obsess over sexuality and breeding to the exclusion of most other things. This phenomena is known as the Seeking, and it is polite in batarian culture to not disrupt a batarian's life too much when he is going through this period.

Amusingly, there are even instances where high-caste batarians will forgo killing or enslaving lower-caste batarians who slight them if the explanation is given the batarian in question was distracted by the Seeking. A batarian who can expand his family to more than fifteen wives and have a dozen offspring is seen as potent, successful, farsighted, and admirable.

Only the highest levels of batarian society demonstrate a need for anything approaching external approval, the final level of the hierarchy. Once all batarians in and near his social circles bow to his primacy, the ascendant batarian male feels a strong need to show the other – be that unfamiliar batarians or aliens – that he is indeed supreme. This is most often seen in high-caste and Hegemon-caste batarians, and is the source of the famous dismissive arrogance most of them display.

It is this impulse that also explains why batarians will commit acts of atrocity and then pull back and not follow up on them. They wish the impact of such things to resonate in the mind of the observer, to make them feel helpless and fearful, and to show their power. Such things enrage humans and turians, disgust asari, and make the salarians laugh as they take advantage of the openings, but batarians are too blind to see this.

* * *

 **Batarian Psychology and Age**

Batarians have roughly three developmental periods from a mental and psychological point of view: the dawn, the rising, and the dusk, as they put it.

Dawn stretches in most cases from early childhood to around middle age or just before it. A batarian in this phase of life is energetic, driven, and pushing hard to achieve his greater goals and dominance. This drive and energy (along with the usual arrogance) can be seen even in batarians in middle age, if they are close to achieving their goal.

The rising usually stretches from middle age to old age. A batarian who succeeds at his goals will become smug and satisfied, almost genial – one who did not will be bitter, hateful, and cruel. Older batarians are thus either extremely hostile or more open to interactions with others – most merchants, for example, truly begin operating outside of Batarian Space only after reaching middle age.

The dusk is the old age of a batarian, marked by mental instability, a growing fear of death by treachery, an obsessive desire to be remembered and to have a legacy, and depression as sexual impotence and failing physical prowess destroy the batarian's sense of self-worth. Most batarians at this age retire from activity, surrounding themselves with young females and reminders of their victories and glories.

Batarian females have very little alterations in mental state until they start growing older – most who do so are put to death, but a few linger on if they are the only wife of a lower-caste batarian and have picked up any useful skills. There is some anecdotal evidence that older batarian females become slightly more intelligent, but it is fragmented and – to be honest – any improvement would be slight at best, hardly worth looking for.

* * *

 **Batarian Castes**

To be perfectly honest, the castes are more cultural than psychological. I will relate what I can address directly. On the surface, given batarian needs for dominance and feeling important, the idea of castes would seem to imply lower-caste batarians would be depressed and morose, but this isn't the case at all.

Physically, there are vast differences between low, mid, and high-caste types, and some between high-castes and the Imperials. Psychologically? There's not a lot of difference between them, except the higher the caste the more arrogant and violent they tend to be. A low-caste batarian, given the rights and powers of a high-caste, will act just like a high-caste type.

Thus, despite the large seeming physical difference between castes, these beings remain remarkably consistent mentally across castes. This is vastly disturbing, as it implies one of two things. Either batarian low-castes are so mentally warped that they actually think the tiny bits of freedom they are given makes them the equal of a high-caste, or their minds are so twisted they edit out the fact that no matter how high they rise they are little more than trash in the minds of higher-caste types.

* * *

 **Batarian Sexuality and Love**

You can go ahead and dismiss the concept of batarian 'love' – the idea of a male feeling anything but dominating cruelty or disdain for a female is so baffling there is not even a word for it. Some batarian homosexual relationships are based on mutual respect – but love is something they cannot embrace. There are krogan love songs, drell love songs – even salarian love songs. Yet with all the richness of batarian music, there is not a single song that speaks of love, save for the love of dominance, the love of violence, the love of looking down upon one's possessions.

Most people hear stories of batarians enslaving asari maidens and young human woman, submitting them to horrific and repeated rapes, and assume batarians are fixated on sex. This is not true – the act of sexuality in batarian society is always conveyed as rape – batarian females have no ability or understanding of _how_ to consent, and the concept never entered the batarian mind.

To a male batarian, females are there to be used by males. The idea that she may not wish to be used is something that amuses most male batarians, and they find the concept of human and asari being mentally wrecked by rape as something hilarious, and a sign of asari and human weakness. They see it as pointless – a batarian has no problems offering up his lesser wives to another batarian to take as a matter of courtesy, and unmarried females offer themselves up as a sign of respect.

Batarians mating urges are mostly female driven – males only feel, based on reports, a faint sort of constant need to commit sex acts. Females go into regular heats once every Khar'shan standard month, and outside of this period are unlikely to become pregnant.

(The ugly facts around Misken III, where a Corsair unit attacking a batarian pirate camp came across and raped batarian females, who after the assault quietly followed their attackers back on the ship and brokenly asked if they did well, drove home the fact that batarians as a species are hopelessly and irrevocably sick.)

Psychologically speaking, batarian sexuality doesn't really exist. Batarians don't have pornography, and none of their visual arts even bothers to depict the female form. The very concept of 'arousal' is less about lust (and has nothing to do with love at all) and more to do with dominating and controlling.

Batarians have demonstrated a marked preference for turian females (for obvious, if sickening, reasons) when capturing alien females for repeated use, although humans and asari are closer to their own body style. It should come as little surprise that a great deal of business done on Omega by black market biotech firms is mass production of turian hormones that reduce enslaved turian females to little more than willing sex slaves. A batarian loves to rape, but the acceptance of such is seen as even a higher pleasure, a confirmation of domination.

Batarians do not typically have more 'normal' sexual concerns – for obvious reasons they could care less if their victims are hurt by their assaults. They also have a lack of care about issues such as the size of their sexual organs, unlike humans, turians, and krogan.

That being said, batarian males are utterly horrified by damage to their genitals and the idea of impotency is a nightmare. A batarian who suffers from impotency is seen as less of a male, almost a failure despite any other success he might achieve.

I made an attempt to come up with some kind of understanding of how batarian females look at sexuality, but they can barely grasp the concept. There is not a single recorded episode of a batarian female resisting even the most violent sexual assault of ANY sapient being, not just batarian males.

The subject is frankly enough to make me wish I had not eaten lunch. I find it hard to give much sympathy for most aliens, but the plight of the batarian female is worth at least a few angry tears, I would think.

Fittingly, these monsters have no tear ducts, and cannot cry.

* * *

 **Batarian Families**

Psychologically speaking, batarians only see 'family' as a construct of male offspring. The concept of 'female child' roughly translates to 'useless mouth too young to mount.' The vileness of these people – nay, these animals – cannot be overstated.

That being said, the batarian family is a loose affair. Concepts of brotherhood are important to batarians, as they view blood ties as essential. Most families are extended families of a single powerful older male and a network of cousins, nephews, and sons.

Batarian names are reversed in importance – the more important a batarian is, the fewer names he has. Most lower-caste batarians have four names – two public and two private. Higher-castes only have the two public names, and the Imperials each go by one name. Psychologically, this is some sort of boost to self-worth, but the concepts are as much cultural as psychological, and thus Pel can address them, assuming the fool is sober when he writes up the cultural section with Trellani.

* * *

 **Batarian Morality and Ethics**

Don't make me laugh.

Seriously, I spent a good two hours trying to research this before realizing that 'ethics' to a batarian is 'whatever I feel like doing right now as long as no one stops me.'

The Pillar religion mostly defines how to live in terms of meditation, eating, treatment of nature, and killing of enemies. It speaks of strength of will and purpose, how the batarians are the holy instruments of the Dark Gods, and all matter of superstitious claptrap, as Mr. Leng would put it.

It does not, however, touch on morality, or ethics. The closest it gets to such is to suggest that 'law is written by the spatter of blood upon the mace, not the words of those who never pick it up.'

Not a lot of difference in that and salarian morals, except batarians don't even care if they are caught – only if the party catching them can punish them is it seen as wrong, and that mostly because the batarian in question was too weak to defend themselves.

Theft and murder are not crimes – if one is too weak or stupid to protect their property or lives, then the batarians are better off with that one dead. The idea of rape as anything but entertainment is completely alien to the batarian viewpoint. They do not tolerate 'treason,' but the definition they have is basically anyone who opposes the Emperor or the Hegemon for any reason.

Psychologically, batarians do not feel guilt. For _anything_. Ever. Keep that in mind.

* * *

 **Batarian Recidivists**

I find the nature of this term (which is the closest translation I can get to the batarian term) vastly amusing.

In short, there are a very few batarians who seemingly possess either a shred of a soul, or grew up in an environment not conducive to the sort of sick ideals championed by mainline batarian society. While sadly the females remain much the same (if a bit more capable of speaking and communication), the male has a marked tendency towards less aggression and more of a nervous focus on self-preservation, gathering wealth, and wariness of offending aliens.

These outcasts are usually found far from batarian borders, and are not Hegemony citizens. As the Emperor has declared any batarian who does not swear eternal loyalty to him a heretic and criminal, and the Hegemon has declared any batarian who is not a citizen to be a traitor, these batarians have no choice but to sublimate their arrogance, casual brutalization of females, and other such traits.

These batarians are slightly more tolerable than most Hegemony batarians. I suppose that is much akin to saying that drinking human urine is more tolerable than drinking battery acid, but there you have it. Most batarians of this nature are inhabitants of Omega, or are among the few of the exiles still aboard the Citadel.

More polite and certainly less revoltingly arrogant than 'real' batarians, these outcasts tend to harbor vast jealousy and hatred towards their homeland. This makes them a useful resource in infiltration of the Hegemony, but care must be taken – they have no respect for any kind of female except the strongest. The only females strong enough to compel respect from batarians include powerful matriarchs and asari justicars, a few warlords such as Aria, and a handful of krogan females.

These batarians demonstrate some level of loyalty to those who can demonstrate strength and dominance, regardless of whether or not they are batarian or not. Aria's lieutenants have come from a single lineage of batarian sidekicks who all take the name of 'Bray,' and she's had them working for her for over sixty years now.

That being said, it's the difference between drinking urine and battery acid – they are still grotesque, revolting, and cruel.

* * *

 **Batarians and Alien Relations in General**

With the noted exception of the recidivists, most batarian reactions towards aliens can be summed up in a single phrase – arrogant sneering dismissal.

Even the most wretched low-caste batarian slave sees himself as higher in the universe's pecking order than the Queen of the asari or a Manswell. Batarians seemingly refuse to grasp the concept they are not the alpha males of the entire galaxy, and anything that reinforces reality on their fevered and stupid minds enrages them.

They are not above stealing useful ideas, creations, and technologies from aliens, but tend to see themselves as better at everything, bragging on things that would make a human facepalm in disgust. They refuse to allow their culture to absorb any traits from those of other cultures (about their only positive trait in my mind) and are not above the insane tactic of somehow claiming to be superior and yet suggesting anything they don't lead in is due to alien malfeasance and stealing it from the batarians in the first place.

The batarians are the most friendly, if that word can even be used, towards the krogan. Krogan females are rarely found off of Tuchanka, and the males are powerful, simple, and disinclined towards bothering batarian interests much. The fact that no batarian can intimidate a krogan physically has led to the grudging admittance that krogan are 'perhaps' their physical equals, although batarians are smug when pointing out they didn't need salarian help to move past the age of atomics. (The fact that the squints never had enough brains to develop atomic weapons until Aria sold them the idea goes unmentioned. Brutes.)

That being said, no batarian has yet been stupid enough to try and enslave a krogan male, much less a krogan female. I, for one, cannot wait for some fool to try, if only to see just how many batarians the krogan can kill in a furious rampage before the Citadel intervenes.

Batarians hate quarians because they see quarian immune disorders as a sign of weakness, and because the quarians are refugees and fleeing from something stronger. Most batarians make taking quarian slaves a priority due to their technical skills, and quarian females are rarely subjected to rape due to the likelihood such exposure would kill them. A quarian who is of no further use to a batarian master, however, will be disposed of – remember, batarians despise weakness in any form.

Batarians are sullenly respectful towards salarians, who confuse them. Salarians look weak to batarian eyes, but a salarian can kill a batarian before the brute can even move, and their STG appeals to batarian delight in subterfuge and cunning. The fact that the race is dominated by females is a mark against them, but almost no batarian has ever seen a salarian female, so many batarians think the entire idea is a scheme by the 'real salarian male leaders' to conceal their true nature. Batarians are leery about taking salarian slaves as the STG reaction tends to be highly explosive and involve some nasty pathological agents – the last such raid only ended up costing six million batarians their lives due to a form of hemorrhagic plague the STG 'accidentally' flung at Khar'shan after the slaves were recovered.

There are times I could almost respect the grays.

Batarians think hanar would make tasty steaks, and dismiss the drell as slave-servants and thus unworthy of notice. Given the distance between the two races, there is almost no interaction between them. The same is true for the elcor, although the multi-sexual nature of the elcor baffles the batarians – the idea of turning into a woman is enough to make them shiver with terror.

Pel suggests we contract the salarians to come up with, and I quote: "some kind of virus that makes the squints all grow titties and turn into bitches." I can almost see the amusement value in this, but I do not think we should encourage the salarians to begin pulling biological practical jokes on various races, as this cannot end well for anyone involved.

Batarians hate the turians above all other races, even ours. Turian 'honor' strikes batarians as childlike and foolish. Their infatuation with the female of their species and treating them as equals is sickening in batarian eyes; their willingness to submit to those weaker is a sign of frailty. Worst of all in batarian eyes, the turian sublimates the individual for the group. Batarians are innately, highly selfish – only when presented with truly dire situations does anything like sacrificing for the group happen to batarians and even then it is grudging. For turians to do so as a matter of routine strikes batarians as insanity.

Batarian hatred of turians may be another reason why they delight so much in brutalizing and breaking turian females they make into slaves, along with the delight of broadcasting such to the Hierarchy and smiling at the enraged turian male reaction at seeing female turians begging to be used by endless lines of batarian males. While I dislike the turians intensely, I cannot help but suggest that if they go into to burn out the batarians we should offer them our help – they are sickening monsters without a single redeeming value and I would rather worship a fucking asari than coexist with the squints.

Asari and batarian relations are complex. Batarians see asari as the strongest females, and thus find them the most desirable aliens to dominate. Asari biotic strength fascinates and frightens the batarian – especially as only flawed batarians doomed to death can express biotics. The overwhelming strength and power of the asari, both as individuals and as a race, is intensely damaging to the entire batarian psychological basis, and as a result batarians have tendency – as insane as this sounds – to try and ignore asari outside of capturing them in the Traverse to viciously rape and kill in some pathetic attempt to prove they are stronger.

Animals. Even those witches don't deserve that kind of vile death.

Batarian interactions with humanity are equally complex. Despite changes in the culture of humanity over the past century, we remain mostly male-dominated, something the batarians can at least identify with. Unlike asari and turians, some cultural elements of our two races – music, individualism, and the concept of a manifest destiny – resonate quite well together. Batarians hate us because we were even more oppressed and assaulted than they were and yet survived, and because the Council chose us over them, cementing their inferiority.

Of course, the conflicts between our races run the hottest because both batarians and humans are the types who do not give up grudges or vengeance. The idea that we are the closest culturally and psychologically to these things is enough to drive me to drink or to despair, but thankfully, no human culture has actually sunk to the depths of the batarian.

In the final analysis, the fact that batarian pirate groups include humans quite often and only the very rare turian, salarian, or krogan should tell you how they view us. We are almost as good as they are – faint praise from this sick accumulation of rapists and deluded fuckups, but there you have it.

* * *

 **Batarian Mental Issues and Diseases**

Pel has jokingly suggested all batarians are suffering from 'crazy.' While normally I'm inclined to dismiss his profanity-laden rantings, in this instance he may have a point.

Repeatedly, both in historical documents and in cultural aspects, we've seen the batarians were not always the savage, sick monsters they are today. Given their entire psychology seems to rotate around the mindset they now have, either the darkening of their culture is a natural evolution as they get more and more debased, or something has corroded and corrupted them and the very methods they view the universe with.

I do not have the resources or time to perform the long-term studies it would require to answer the question concretely. I can say batarians succumb to mental breakdowns and collapses at a rate ten times greater than even the mentally unstable salarians, and can experience dementia and a form of disease similar to Alzheimer's, but with certain emotional instabilities, as early as twenty-five Khar'shan years of age. That is definitely not normal and I would usually take it as a sign of some malicious cognitohazard.


	5. Chapter 5 : Batarian Culture, Structure

**The Cerberus Files :** **Outcast Races**

* * *

 **Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE**

 **ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

* * *

Beloved Jack, irritated Richard, and patient Rachel,

Kai and Pel have once more forwarded me some… research into the state of the batarian culture. To quote the always entertaining Pel: "the batarians are so fucked up that it's hard to pick out which set of squints is the worst." Their investigation is nearing its close – they report they are gathering some final bits of information before evacuating Batarian Space – and given that what they obtained in regards to culture was somewhat scattershot, and that the good doctor is still occupied, I agreed once more to assist in this segment.

I believe Pel himself is planning on attempting to write up the details section of the report, which is an interesting choice. Kai Leng has actually made comments suggesting this should be an entertaining event. Given the turian biology report, I must agree. Then again, you are probably not interested in levity from these reports…

I digress. Most of what they sent me was cultural works and some very good extranet reports and books on batarian culture prior to the Batarian Hegemony leaving the Citadel Accords over the Council's choice to back humanity in the Skyllian Verge. Many of these sources contradict one another, and it has taken me some time to merge everything into one coherent document.

Despite the age of such documentation, most of it appears to be still in action – batarian culture is sluggish and changes only slowly – and as the good Doctor Minsta would no doubt point out, always for the worst. The fact that batarian culture is so deterministic in its nature, so closed to outside influence, so isolated from any mitigating inputs that would make the batarians less… I hesitate to use the word evil, but no other word fits… is both curious and somewhat ominous.

The thought strikes me that when one looks upon a sea that has no tributaries or rivers leading to it, one can always expect to find contaminants and poisons in the water. Batarian culture is not only incredibly insular and hostile to outside influence, but seemingly structured in such a way that appreciation of the 'other' is only permissible from a position of strength. Given that the batarians do not, to put it mildly, occupy a strong economic, military, or political position in galactic affairs, this blasé disregard seems anomalous.

Or perhaps I am merely too much in tune with siari and too alien to understand the dicta and rationales of a race of brutal rapist thugs who eat one another. I am inclined to agree with Minsta that the batarians do not even compare favorably with vorcha.

 **Cerberus Thought for the Day:** _Death is preferable to submission if life is reduced to slavery._

* * *

 **Batarian Cultural Basics : Family Units and the Role of Patriarchs**

A batarian 'family' is a curiously mono-atomic structure in many ways. Families are traced through blood lineage through males, and given family names are separated from personal names – a low-caste batarian with the average name of Ivak Gurth (the batarian equivalent of your John Doe or the asari Shisa S'Yama) would not use his family name in daily business.

Most families consist of a circle of brothers or cousins – five to as many as fifteen – who each will have between one and more than fifteen wives. Eldest sons of the circle will inherit leadership of the family, younger sons are expected to either start their own circles or expand another circle once fifteen family heads are reached.

Most families are, curiously enough, not very sociable. Low-castes are the most interconnected, often pooling their meager resources to build housing and operate what businesses are allowed to the low-caste. Mid and high-castes are often separated, the links of 'family' only seen during the High Holidays or during the worship of the Dark Gods.

Amusingly, a family's primary value is in the quality of females they produce, in terms of how fertile and sturdy they are and how many children one can bear before dying of exhaustion. Most family interactions are done by the family patriarch, usually the eldest of the circle, and often consist of blunt trafficking in adolescent females. (Kai points out that this is usually where media reports of the ugly 'rape parties' occur – buyers are encouraged to… test the merchandise, so to speak.) Some families are little more than glorified breeding houses of sturdy females.

As usual, the Hegemon and Imperial-castes break this mold – families here are strictly demarcated by the eldest male, and usually limited to those within three generations of the current patriarch. Beyond that, younger males are expected to start their own. There is no gruesome wife trading and most related families all live in massive fortified compounds – the Hegemon has six compounds on the moon of Khar'shan, each one boasting forty to fifty related family groups.

The word 'family' in the batarian language best translates to 'blood connections' – there is not, I point out, any sense of the human atomic family in these groupings, more like old-style nepotistic favoritism or ancient human tribal groupings. More pointedly, unlike almost every other species, batarians don't demonstrate any biological tendency towards protection of their own family groups – a batarian will sell out the interests of a brother as quickly as they would a stranger.

* * *

 **Batarian Cultural Basics : the Castes**

When most people think of the batarian culture, they immediately fixate on the caste system. As Kai Leng pointed out, in practice it is not much different in some ways than volus ranks of worth, the turian meritocracy, or human citizenship tiers.

The main difference in those systems and castes is that one can move up (or down) in the various systems of most alien races, even if you are born into them. The batarian caste ideal is utterly rigid, and moving outside of your caste is not only impossible, but (in the view of their religion) heretical.

The castes are basically divided into the low-caste, the middle-caste, and the high-castes. The high-castes themselves are separated into the high-caste, the High Militant, the Hegemon-caste, the Imperial-caste, and the Imperial Family.

There are also 'bracketing' castes – the low-mid, the mid-high, and the Less High. These are small castes of very strict organization and limited applique for most cultural purposes.

The current low-caste is batarians on the bottom of society. They serve as rank and file military enlisted, low-level workers, miners, farmers, and those who handle toxic waste. About forty percent of the caste entire is actually slaves, but most batarian slaves are actually overseers of alien slave populations, or otherwise better-off than non-batarian slaves.

Low-caste culture is mostly fixated around food, housing, fighting, games of chance, and communal music. They have few holidays and as a whole tend towards surly insularity, while engaging in surprisingly cutting sarcasm towards higher-castes.

The 'low-mids' are mixed-caste bastard offspring of low-caste slave mothers and mid-caste fathers, and have mixed features between the two castes. All low-mid-caste members are trained from birth to act as police enforcers and peacekeepers for low-caste cities and settlements. Like the mid-caste and above, low-mids are protected by law from slavery for reasons other than direct rebellion or debt servicing. Low-mid culture is otherwise identical to the culture of the lows, and most low-mids do not consider themselves 'higher.'

The middle-caste is markedly more intelligent than the low-caste and makes up fifty-five percent of the batarian population. The mids are usually non-commissioned officers and senior enlisted, technical workers, factory workers, shopkeepers, merchants, traders, and low-level government workers. Mid-castes are also the only caste allowed to bury the dead.

Middle-caste culture is remarkably rich – food styles, clothing, and musical tastes vary wildly, and mid-caste, unlike the low, engage in sports, entertainment, and other venues of public activities. Most mid-caste groups form occupational clans (see below) and tend to have more willingness to help other batarians.

Interestingly, the mid-caste are also the only batarians who are allowed to settle in the fringes of the Hegemony – low-caste populations are almost entirely on core worlds, as are higher-castes. The middle-caste is the 'average' batarian in most people's eyes.

Framing the middle-caste are two sub-castes, the mid-high and the Less High. The mid-high are, once again, bastard offspring of mid-caste mothers and high-caste fathers, and like the low-mid, are locked into a single vocation from birth – they are the direct servant caste to the Hegemon and Imperial-castes. Mid-high-castes are usually strenuously educated and are the most 'exposed' to external ideas, being expected to vet such influences before allowing them into the ranks of their masters. Most mid-high are best compared to some human subcultures who have 'butlers,' I believe – they are (for batarians) rather polite and often far more discerning than their masters.

The Less High are actually disgraced High-caste batarian groups stripped of their rank who have crossbred extensively with the middle-castes. In most cases, the Less High are still wealthy and are the top tier of middle-caste society, often small business owners, artists, and musicians.

The high-castes are exclusively bred familial lines and occupy the 'top' of batarian common culture. For the purposes of our examination (and to prevent Kai Leng from lengthy exasperated comments on the 'uselessness' of such reviews), I will submit that the high, High Militant, and Hegemon-castes are roughly all on the same level.

High-castes occupy officer positions in the military, own eighty percent of all businesses and most slaving operations, and are expected, if not in these occupations, to take up music, art, dueling, or some other 'elevated' task. Most batarian culture is actually trickle-down from the high-castes, including musical trends, haptic and holovid programming, and clothing styles.

High-caste culture (and even more so Hegemon culture) is obsessed with face, and duels of honor and the like are very common on this level of society. The high-caste itself is more focused on business and leisure, while the High Militant are familial lines that produce most of the SIU officers, Fist of Khar'shan, and elite batarian mercenary units.

The Hegemon-caste is currently the seven families that rotate through the election and control of the position of Hegemon. By law and tradition, they are not allowed to live on Khar'shan itself, nor outside of the system, but must inhabit the moon and space stations in orbit around Khar'shan. The Hegemon-caste is very wealthy and most of them mingle with the high and High Militant-castes socially and to pick up females. It is also the only caste that regularly imports and uses cultural items and luxuries from other races.

Atop this entire stack of castes are the Imperial-caste and Family. The Family is defined as those within two blood relations of the current Emperor – everyone else of the line is merely the Imperial-caste. The Imperials rarely if ever leave their massive, heavily fortified estates on either Khar'shan near the Black Palace and the Lake of Black or on the five water worlds they claim for themselves.

The bulk of the Imperial-caste forms the Imperial Guard – non-Imperial high-caste with very good connections can rarely rise as high as non-commissioned officer, no other castes can even join. The Imperial-caste as a whole is mostly religious in nature, and all non-military caste members are either artists, musicians, or other talents engaged in something related to the worship of the Dark Gods.

* * *

 **Batarian Cultural Basics : Names**

Batarians have a number of strange beliefs around names. Most batarian names are actually corruptions of an older language that is only used by the Imperial-caste in religious connotations.

Batarians have a number of names that decrease based on caste, but can also have additional appellations that are not seen as a drawback. The more names a batarian has, the less esteemed they are, but the more titles they have, the more impressive they are.

Low-caste batarians have four names – two private names and two public ones. The private names are only used amongst relatives, while the public names are for everyday use. Particularly successful low-caste batarians can style themselves as 'Father' or even 'Grandfather.'

Mid-caste batarians retain one personal and two public names, but highly decorated officers are sometimes gifted with a title and allowed to 'remove' one public name. Titles among mid-caste vary between military appellations (their version, I suppose, of medals and honors) and publicly granted names for popular musicians.

All the high-castes have two public names at birth, and upon maturity pick one or the other. Most of them have begun in the past few decades of formally appending the family name to their own name. The current Hegemon, Bairak, often presages his name with a combination of title and family name, Kul'halak – roughly, 'godlike power.'

The importance of names is curious – batarians who have private names go to great lengths to keep them private. An exposed private name is attached to the public name, giving them more names and thus less impressive miens to those who know them.

The highest honor, of course, for any batarian is for the Emperor himself to 'slay' one of the names of a person. This is a ritual to the Dark Gods that requires the sacrifice of an eye, which is covered with an eye-patch and sigil indicating the Dark Gods have already taken a quarter of the honored one's soul. If this is done to a high-caste, then he has no name left, and is merely addressed by a title – the current head of the SIU has some outlandish name of this sort.

I cannot help but juxtapose the naming issues of the batarian with what little I know about hanar soul and face names. I wonder if there is a connection.

* * *

 **Batarian Cultural Basics : Other**

Most batarian culture is centered around activity and food. Music plays a huge role in every batarian's daily life, with almost all public events and many small holidays associated with given songs or sonatas.

If asari culture is built upon on the blending of ideas, on the consensus of culture, on the lack of focus on variance and taking comfort in the identical, then batarian culture is based more on the consensus of admiration, on the lack of conflict within caste groups, and the loose, faint association of other caste members as 'brothers' and on impressing others.

Batarian greetings are what Pel calls 'macho bullshit,' posturing, insults, braggadocio, and the like making up a large part. Some of this is semi-serious; other acts are gentle joking or deadly insult. This is, of course, only true for contemporaries – when two differing castes meet, the only interaction is chilly indifference from the higher and mewling submission from the lower.

While Pel will touch on the actual aspects of various bits of culture, I wish to again reinforce the point that batarians take comfort in the thought of their own superiority, and much of batarian art, music, statuary, architecture, and clothing is designed to boost the ego of the wielder, wearer, or beholder. (The batarian word for humble is a borrowing from a turian term for dangerously insane.)

* * *

 **Batarian Social Structure**

Given the already complex nature of how batarians are organized into castes, it would not surprise me to expect that to be the limit of social structure. However, inside the castes there are additional levels of bifurcation and ritual to be found.

There is a hard, clear divide between batarian family groups that pursue business, slavery, the arts, or the military. All four are seen as 'worthy' – batarians interested in history, high finance, most sciences, and alien cultures are seen as weak or eccentric at best.

Batarian slaves in the low-castes are more sullen and less willing to aid others than free-born low-castes, but any form of altruism is extraordinarily rare in batarian culture on any level.

Aside from this, there are also subtle structures based on the prosperity and status of family members, of personal physical power and the like. This touches on every aspect of their culture – a more respected and powerful batarian mid-caste would be offended if a lesser mid-caste had a more impressive looking storefront, or bought more ad space than he did. Batarians are expected to preen and boast to a certain point, and then defer to those more successful until their own fortunes rise.

* * *

 **Batarian Religion : the Dark Gods**

The batarian religion is… disturbing at best. I am fully aware that all of you – all of Cerberus – have seen some of the most horrible excess performed by all species. Despite the wistful hopes of decent humans like your General Petrovsky, even the elcor have undertaken some actions that would draw outrage from the average sapient.

The batarians go _much_ farther than that.

The batarian state religion holds the Emperor is a divinely empowered being – the direct voice and avatar of the Dark Gods of the Lake of Black, who inscribed the Pillars of Strength. There are certain chilling similarities between the inscriptions we know of on those pillars and the ruins found on the blasted hellworld of Carcosa… where a vast palace complex much like the Batarian Emperor's was also situated on a lakefront.

The Dark Gods are supposedly beings beyond our feeble ability to see or grasp, who championed the batarian people to control and dominate all life everywhere. If batarians fail to do so, it is the fault of the batarian for being too soft, weak, or caring. The Pillars encourage the embrace of violence as law, of bloodshed as justice, and to view life as the batarian's chance to achieve enough great deeds to impress the Dark Gods.

Batarians who are successful become a part of the Lake of Black, existing in a state of bliss, while those who fail to do so are either consumed to feed the Dark Gods or are cursed to wander in the afterlife blind and with an incomplete soul for all eternity. Those who are consumed by the Dark Gods have their souls cast away after, and come back as batarian females, to serve the males who are the proper worshipers of the Dark Gods.

This religion embraces terrible concepts – cannibalism of other batarians (particularly eyes, hearts, and brains) is only the beginning. The idea that females of other species are destined to be broken sexual toys for any batarian to use, the idea that 'peace' and 'kindness' are actually negatives, and most of all, that non-batarian life has no value at all, are core concepts of this religion.

The Dark Gods themselves raise many questions, as the batarians have NEVER let any aliens within a thousand stanlengths of the Lake of Black, and almost all attempts by the STG to get close have not only failed spectacularly, but have had the operatives tortured by the SIU in methods that would sicken a krogan to watch.

More worriedly, both Kai Leng and Pel reported multiple disturbing rumors about the Lake of Black – many batarians report hearing voices, walking hallucinations, and other issues. Local conditions are unnaturally stable – the entire region has been under an ongoing rainstorm for over _seven centuries_ , with several large-scale flooding and waste-water projects required over hundreds of kilometers of terrain and cruel droughts west and south of the region.

The priests of the Dark Gods are all high-caste (usually Imperial-caste) and eight to ten percent of all slaves shipped to Khar'shan are used in blood sacrifice rituals, usually conducted using bionetic attachments to keep victims alive up until the very end. One of P.'s most famous videos shows at long distance one such ritual, where a turian has his plating slowly torn off a strip at a time while he is being tortured with shock rods and hallucinatory drugs. His life ends when Beastmasters have their animals gnaw off his limbs before he is beheaded by the priest and his blood gathered up and splashed upon the Pillars, where it appears to smoke and then vanish.

We cannot obtain much information regarding the Dark Gods – the batarians are simply too paranoid and insular to provide much information, and only the Imperials know what is really going on. To point out that obtaining an Imperial captive at this time would be very nearly impossible would be an understatement.


	6. Chapter 6 : Batarian Culture, Expression

**The Cerberus Files : Outcast Races**

* * *

 **Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **MARS-ZERO-FIVE-EIGHT**

 **ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

* * *

Bossman, Boss Lady, Boss Terminator,

Everyone's so goddamned amused I plan to write up this part of the report, but it's not funny from where I'm sitting.

I ain't one to sit and ponder on shit like the aesthetics of a culture. I know I'm not educated, and I know I'm pretty smart – but things like that never were my speed. Don't mean I don't get it, and it don't mean I can't see why you need that part.

You can't find what you can't understand – something Kai needs to get into his head – and understanding the batarians has jackshit all to do with their fucked up morality, whack-ass military, and whatever the fuck is wrong with their food. It has to do with why they're the way they are.

When Kai and I started going over this mission the boss gave us due to some bullshit, I wasn't really thinking much about the, fuck, what's the word? Implications! Yeah. But seeing these poor bastards up-close sort of brings it all home.

Like I was saying, aesthetics don't usually get me. But like cheap drapes around a fancy window or a shitty suit with a nice tie, it stands out if it ain't right. The more we talked to people – faking as being slave purchasers, talking with some mid-high bastard, or kidnapping some batarian historian and dropping them d's on him until he talked – the more I felt something was fucking wrong here.

I don't mean wrong as in 'they rape the women, burn whole planets for revolting for having no food, and eat each other.' And I don't mean wrong in the kind of bullshit the SIU and the Eyes of Khar'shan get up to without most people knowing.

I mean the wrong in the fucking day-to-day. We're used to seeing batarians away from the Hegemony, you know? The ones inside it are… fuck. I can't even describe it, it's like everyone sees the shit they do as normal, but none of it makes sense. Lots of things are broken – Kai said it was like a complicated puppet show with no one familiar with what the fuck puppets actually do.

Anyway, it made my goddamned skin crawl enough I want my own voice to be heard on what I see. I ain't educated like the doc or the asari lady. Ain't gonna pretend I am. But in comprehending shit? I think I can see things they don't or won't cause they don't want to, bossman.

 **Cerberus Message of the Day:** _–_ _error_ _–_ _filenotfound404_ _–_ _filecorrupt_

* * *

 **Batarian Culture : Art and Architecture**

Right off the bat as we started this mess we did an extranet pull of shit while we cruised spinward around the edge of the Hegemony. Most of the time we posed as slavers ourselves, or agents for a fucked up Lord of Sol looking for pleasure servants and shit.

No one even _bothered_ checking if we were legit, which is fucking depressing. Not the point, but something to think about for future infiltration.

Anyway, when you meet with most of the slaver fuckers you come to find out most aren't high-caste vampire weirdos. Sure, they own the camps, the ships, whatnot, and all that. But it's the mid-highs that do the dirty work, and the mid-highs who do the selling to aliens.

You meet with these fuckers in what look like goddamned palaces, acres and acres of cultivated land and little fucked up batarian trees and shit. And in places like this you usually have fancy shit.

And there is none. It's all well made, but plain.

And you notice the art right away. Now, I'm not big into art. Mostly the art I like is in NeoPenthouse, but occasionally I'll watch a bit of opera. (Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. I also like _Cats_ and _Ice-Type Nine_. I ain't a thug… exactly.)

But I'm at least familiar with most art, because of Petrovsky's weird missions to grab it for insights into alien races. So I've seen batarian art before.

This isn't the art of sane people, boss.

Batarian art comes in three forms, and _only_ three forms: fuckass statues in black rock or metal, huge murals on walls or the sides of buildings, and standing pillars, always worked from natural stone in the ground.

There's no portraiture. No other kinds of paintings. No knickknacks, no woodcarving, nothing. No haptic art. Architecture is all straight hard lines and domes, big pillar-like skyscrapers, and half-cylinder houses. Variations are seen as heresy and the poor motherfuckers who try it are burned alive.

Not that many do. I saw a bunch of statues, none of it of actual batarians. One slaver had a hall filled with this black statuary bullshit; every piece of it was these completely fucked up _shapes_ that crossed my eyes to look at. We asked one guy who was proud of it what it represented, and he said the statues were made from dreams.

If your dreams are of some kind of black hentai tentacle bullshit wrapping around and crushing a planet, or a tidal wave of fanged jaws chewing apart a city, or (the worst) a bunch of faceless writhing figures chained together into the shape of a batarian fist smashing other people to death, you have problems.

None – repeat, _NONE_ – of the statues depicted batarians. That's for the murals, and they're everywhere. The biggest we saw was on the side of a skyscraper and must have been a hundred and fifty meters across. The murals are done in layers, we're told – they always depict a high-caste batarian, or an Imperial, or the Emperor. The murals are done in black, gray, dark blue, dark red, and white – those are the only colors that can be used.

Or else, BBQ. (Then again, the only legal punishments in the batarian government are burning, slavery, having eyes put out, or being eaten, then burned. Fucking lovely. Goddamned squints make turians look like fucking liberals.)

The pillars are everywhere and creepy too. From what I've heard, they're more common on Khar'shan and closer to the center of the Hegemony – and they aren't done by artists. Regular batarians – low, mid, high – go into trances every so often and do them. Just out of the blue. They either finish the pillar or die of starvation or some shit. People admire these things and it's supposedly a sign of favor of the Dark Gods if you get 'taken' or 'possessed' or whatever the hell it's called.

We broke one of these pillars off (long story, tell you later) and got it in the hold for Minsta to glance over. Most are like this one, natural granite. Polished to glass-like smoothness – by fucking hand, no less – and then engraved with those fucked up symbols we found on the Imperial Guard armor and some batarian slave brands.

Trelly says the symbols are similar to the ones on the Pillars of Strength. I say it isn't a good sign of mental health when your peeps are sleepwalking into the fucking countryside and carving out rock pillars of bullshit.

The rest of their art is… _faded_ , man. Like it's done in imitation of something they sort of remember. Dance is either this shit called force-posture between gay batarian males or this ritual dance thing they do in this… rendition of the Dark Gods, like a mix of storytelling, ballet, and religious nuttery. It's called the Flight from the Darkness and made no sense to me or Kai.

We haven't found any other kinds of art. Clothing is always black and scary as fuck, but undecorated. So are almost all buildings, ships, weapons, and even fucking furniture. We saw a squint's bedroom and closet – bedding, furniture, and clothes were all a single primary color with one secondary color. No patterns.

Minsta must have something to chime in on why there's no other kinds of art. Well, music. But that's not artsy art, you know?

* * *

 **Batarian Culture : Music**

Batarians only seem to come alive when music is playing. I'll give 'em credit, the bastards can play better than anyone else.

Batarians don't give a shit for the things most other races get up to, or look down on it more likely, but I played some old jazz for one we visited and the bastard had a guitar omni-printed up and was able to jam with the recording in five minutes. All batarians are good at music, naturals at playing and coming up with tunes. All of them have perfect pitch. (And if they don't, they get killed in childhood.)

I've heard their classical music, so have you – it gets pirated a LOT. Batarians have music for everything from taking a damned shower to naming your kids to farming. And all of it is good. It always has a badass bassline, always sticks in your head, and some of it makes you feel good just listening to it.

And once again… creepy. I listened to some squint musicians jamming to a mix of George Benson, Charlie Parker, Venthix of Koraven, Talthix Venid, and that asari singer… can't remember her name, the one on the Blue Galaxy remix. Anyway, this was the tightest shit I'd heard in my fucking life… and it was musical styles from humans, turians, and asari and didn't go together, but damn if they didn't make it sound good.

Boss, _no one is that good_.

Batarians use a lot of music instruments. Most of 'em are steel-stringed things shaped like a 'C,' big horns that use keys and stop-pipes, and drums that have little brass thingies inside, kinda like a tambourine. Batarian musical stuff always falls into four styles, the first is slide-shift (which has kind of taken over modern music), which is electronica merged with classical that shifts in musical scale based on a secondary rhythm. Second is 'batarian classical,' which is bombastic workout music and songs of praise of the Emperor. Third is 'vheghrul,' or the low-caste music, which is chants and drum work and feels like a mix of bongo music and salarian jump-press.

Then there's Kapi.

Kapi is the 'high' music of the Imperials. Listening to it is illegal for non-Imperials, but it still got out. This stuff is… like someone made Bach real depressed then had him work with a bunch of turian death metal artists, and then handed the recording to a fucking elcor or some shit.

Kapi is long, low sounds in ultrasound frequency over long baroque 'sonatas' sung by specially trained Imperial females. Instruments in the background are a drumline that fades in and out based on the singing and a constant low-level picking of their string instruments along with the normal play that is in time with batarian hearts or some shit.

Kapi bothers me a lot, and I don't know why, but listening to it made me feel like a motherfucker was watching me or some shit. Kai felt the same. Now, we ain't spring chickens no more, you guys. Rachel can tell you the shit we got up into back in the day. I don't spook easy, and Kai, well, you know.

So when shit like this is sending chills up my spine and making me reach for my biggest gun, something is off. I want the doc to take the recordings (attached at the end of the file) and run 'em by Memetics and the crypto spooks, if you three don't mind. Something is wrong in this music.

* * *

 **Batarian Culture : Entertainment and Sports**

Batarians aren't big on entertainment as we'd see it. Then again, they think rape is funny.

Every big city has a fucking outright death arena, of course, where slaves, low-castes, and the occasional mid-caste fight it out. Free batarians fight for money and bragging rights, slaves fight to the death or to disablement, depending on the arena. The arenas offer free food and drinks, but you have to pay a good amount to get in, and transmitting the fights is illegal.

Batarians don't have much else. There are music clubs where you can listen to music, bars and clubs where musicians play, and lots and lots of eateries. But no dance clubs. Obviously, squints don't have to take their women out, so everything is just set up for batarian males.

Batarian sports are divided. Low-castes play grutka, which is like a mix of boxing and football – two goals, ten players on a team; whoever has the ball has to defeat the enemy goal keeper in a fistfight while the rest of the team angles for passes and shit. Lows also do a lot of hunting and fishing, and men will get together after work and lots of wrestling, betting on animal races, and shit like that happens. Kai called it a bunch of macho bullshit.

Even so, there is a feeling of… I dunno. Like it's fake, somehow. Or rote bullshit. No one seems to be having a lot of fun; it's more like they're doing it to… do it? You have to see to understand.

Mids play a couple of sports. They have a more 'refined' version of grutka which is all about passing, position of certain players, and the captains, who have to call out commands for the players, like a game of chess or some shit. There's also tunka, which is axe throwing at moving slave targets. You get points for a clean one-hit kill, but lose points for only wounding. Sick fuckers. Like the lows, mids do a lot of other shit – they play video games, fishing, and love shit like mountain climbing and skydiving and crap like that. They're also the only batarians who bother with 'alien' sports, as they like turian clawball enough to make their own (and more bloody) version.

Highs seem to sneer at the very fucking idea of getting sweaty, so their sports are on the back of fellaui beasts, a game called em'ghast that is a mix of I guess something like polo and racing and (believe it or not) pool. You make goals by banking shots of a ball you hit with a hammer, but you can also score points by crippling the other player's mount with a ricochet as long as you don't hit the rider. If you hit the rider, you get to take a hit from his hammer.

Highs play several board games Kai and I had no chance to look into, hobbyist bullshit like astronomy, and most of them entertain themselves the most with alien slaves. Some of the slaves are kept around (males or females) if they're… what? Intellectually interesting? Some shit like that. One high-caste we visited had a pair of elcor slaves that he liked debating the merits of morality with.

I can't even fucking imagine.

* * *

 **Batarian Culture : Tourism and Events**

You'd laugh at the idea of batarian tourism, but you _shouldn't_.

Minsta said the squints wouldn't even measure up well against the vorcha. Problem is, neither would some others. The batarians run a least five worlds on the edge of their territory as – I shit you not – tourism locales for rich, evil fuckers to come and 'partake' of slaves.

By that I mean sex slavery, and the most revolting goddamned kind I've ever seen. Chipped up turians and asari who can't function unless they're getting banged. Quarian chicks in clean rooms pumped full of antibiotics and nano if you want to bang one. All kinds of human and salarian slaves.

In some of these places you can fuck one and then have them cut up, cooked, and prepared to be eaten, or skinned and made into a goddamned jacket. In other places they'll sell you a 'package' – biotech to control or program the slave, custom equipment to keep them alive, whatever. There's other shit they're into – I got a bit sick in the stomach and didn't investigate. Saw some human kids there, round the same age as my youngest granddaughter, and had to leave to not burn the fucking place to the ground.

Sides, I don't think I really want to know what in fuck could be _worse_ than the shit we already saw.

These worlds have flashy entertainment venues (Aria provides this, the bitch) and all kinds of shit to allow visitors to keep it on the down-low. We know for a fact that at least a few dozen Eldfells roll through one of these worlds weekly, Vabo are all over this place, and even some deviant salarian fucks show up.

Fucking assholes. And I'm almost goddamned proud to say turians never use this kind of shit. Ain't that a hoot?

Batarians themselves don't travel much at all – only high-caste are even permitted to move off-world without permission and most of them are still restricted. The idea of 'tourism' as something batarians do is only indulged in by the Hegemon, who sometimes visits alien worlds for… fuck if I know. Probably scoping out bitches to rape.

Batarians don't have a lot of holidays and all of them are religious in nature. Some of them are for these Dark Gods, whatever the fuck they are, where batarians mostly stay home and the Imperials go to the Lake of Black and meditate.

I'm sure there's more shit I'm missing, but at this stage, I no longer give a fuck since I found out there's also a holiday devoted to raping the shit out of your mate, and a holiday where batarian males are expected to kill females who have gotten pregnant twice and didn't manage a live birth.

Fuck these things, man. These ain't _people_. I'll say I don't like grays, but they're at least fucking people. Batarians are just walking shit.

* * *

 **Batarian Culture : Ritual Combat and Cannibalism**

When squints in the same caste have a problem, they usually just murder each other. Murder's not a crime in the Hegemony unless it's cross-caste.

If a lower-caste kills a higher-caste, they get burned alive, and all of their family with them. No exceptions (except for the below). If a low-caste kills an Imperial, the entire town gets burned up. I'm pretty sure if a low-caste somehow killed the Emperor they would probably just kill fucking everybody.

Now, here is where it gets weird. If a higher kills a lower-caste, the lower-caste's relatives have the option of challenging the death. If they do, another high-caste can fight the killer in single ritual combat. Usually, a higher-caste volunteers to champion them to get at a rival, or simply because he hates the fucker, but a few high-castes actually do it for 'justice.'

Justice! Hahaha! Whew! Haven't laughed that hard in a while.

If the killer wins, the rest of the lower-caste family is made his slaves and all their property is his. If the killer loses, however, the lower-castes are allowed to stab him to death and eat him, and the champion of the lower-castes gets some of the guy's property: money, slaves, whatever.

The fights are not to the death – high-castes battle until one is unable to lift their mace. They're fought in the arenas, but no spectators aside from the lower-caste relatives and a judge are allowed, and they use big heavy metal maces. We found some bootleg footage of several of these fights, and goddamn I do not want to get into melee with these big corn-fed fuckers. Most of 'em can fling around an eleven kilo club like you'd swing a knife.

Cannibalism is a thing, too. Now, batarians will cut up and eat other races too, but ONLY slaves, and _ONLY_ slaves that have done something like fight back. They don't enslave people to eat them, and actually eating a non-batarian is seen as respecting the slave's spirit for not submitting. If they eat a non-batarian that alien might come back as a batarian someday.

Batarians eat other batarians, but again, only in certain circumstances. The Emperor eats anyone stupid enough to oppose him, mostly the eyes and heart. Eating the eyes of another batarian is a really bad insult and curse for religious bullshit reasons. Eating the heart is thought to pass on their strength.

Eating other parts of a batarian is usually only done by a lower-caste to a higher one in the aftermath of the ritual fight shit, and is seen as uplifting to the lowers, giving them a chance to rise in caste when they reincarnate or whatever the fuck the squints believe.

Urban legends and bullshit have batarians eating everyone, tearing out organs and shit and eating them raw. None of that shit is real. Batarians have goddamned recipe books on the best ways to cook up aliens from Omega (where they really do fucking eat people). Most batarians never engage in this stuff.

Still, it's not a good look, is it?

* * *

 **Batarian Culture : Promotion in Caste**

The caste system the squints use is pretty firm, and ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, if you're a low-caste you stay a low-caste, your kids are low-caste, blah, blah, blah.

But very, very rarely a low-caste or mid-caste will do something so fuckawesome the Emperor himself is impressed. The batarian is taken to the Black Palace, and then to the Lake of Black by the Emperor himself, and (according to rumor) is made to drink the water.

The last batarian this happened to was the current high general of the Batarian Defense Force, Muthak the Razored Edge of the Emperor. (Fucking batarian titles are hilarious.) Muthak was a low-caste nobody until he saved the life of one of the Imperials in a riot, killing six other low-caste batarians with a steak knife and losing two eyes in the process.

There's old video of the riot and of Muthak (dude was pretty fierce, give him credit for that). Before, he was about a meter seventy-five, gray skin, typical low-caste squint.

The guy calling himself Muthak now is a meter ninety-three, prolly weighs a hundred thirty-five kilos of muscle, pale beige-white skin, white hair, black fucking fangs, and all that shit. Looks like any other high-caste freakazoid, except he's got two eyes covered in those weird eyepatches that are signs of the Dark Gods' favor and all kinds of strange black runes and shit carved into his face.

Moving up the castes like that is very rare, like I said. It's a big part of the culture, lots of folk stories and whatnot about the ones who did it (they're called the Blessed). In over two thousand years, this has happened all of seven times.

* * *

 **Batarian Culture : Language**

Batarian language sounds like gargling with thumbtacks and Klingon from Star Trek if you ask me.

There's two languages – well, three, actually, but the third is bullshit.

The first is what batarians call dhak'ta – low-speech. It is used most batarians for day-to-day talking. The second language is rhekt'ta – high-speech. Only high-castes, Hegemons, and Imperials use it, and it's kinda like Japanese in Sol, court language, documents, legal bullshit language.

The last one, bhen-hast'ka, literally translates out to 'black speech.' Seriously? I thought fucking turians were bad with melodrama. Anyway, from what we figured out (mostly by cutting up a batarian historian), bhen-hast'ka is like Latin, dead language used only by priests and Imperials.

Here's the fucked up part. Batarian computer languages are mostly shit, stolen and hacked up versions of either salarian datacant or turian clipclaw – occasionally a system will even use human C*. But all the Imperial systems use their own computer language based off of bhen-hast'ka.

Listening to bhen-hast'ka is… ha. Omni-tool says I should the word 'unpleasant.' My ass, it's like listening to goddamned demons. The words just sound fucked up and scary, and the whole freaky vampire thing the high-caste got goin' on doesn't help when they start rasping this shit out.

I could go on… but honestly? I need to shoot something now, bossman. This entire fucking race is fucked up, disgusting, sickening, creepy, and goddamned fake. Why in fuck are we not just killing these four-eyed rapist shitstains? Sure, they make good music, but so does a motherfucking synthesizer, and I ain't got to worry about a keyboard raping my granddaughters.


	7. Chapter 7 : Batarian Government

**The Cerberus Files : Outcast Races**

* * *

 **Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **PLATO-SIX-SIX-FIVE**

 **ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

Mr. Harper, General Florez, milord Williams,

Given Pel's discomfort at reviewing the batarian culture, he was disinclined to review the government. Rather than interrupt Doctor Minsta's efforts in regards to Feros, I have gone ahead and organized what notes we have on the current government structure of the Hegemony.

It is not exactly a clear set of discoveries.

While I am not usually given to personal asides, I feel one is in order here. Pel is unusually demonstrative of the level of unease and a feeling of distant, malevolent observation. I do not dismiss my instincts in this regard, and I wish to put down formally that I agree with Pel, something is dreadfully wrong in this region of space, and with the batarians as a whole.

This is demonstrated in their culture and in their governmental organization.

 **Cerberus Thought for the Day:** _–_ _warning:_ _deleted, unable to parse functionstring getMessage(getDate(SysDate))._

* * *

 **Batarian Government Structures Overview**

Given the striation of batarian society into biologically, culturally, and often intellectually distinct castes, one would of course expect such divisiveness to extend into the government. And yet, what we find instead is a curiously feudal system in which central control is only loosely exercised by the Hegemon and not at all by the Emperor or the Imperials.

At the top of the government is the Batarian Emperor, High T'hanakur Venkarith, Sixty-Seventh of the Line of Batar. I have omitted a long list of spurious and dubious appellations that mean nothing. He is twenty-five years old, and from what we have gathered from the various murals, rumor, and hearsay, stands well over two point two meters tall and is impressively muscular. Venkarith (T'hanakur is a ritual title roughly translated to 'herald') has six hundred high-caste wives, nineteen brothers, and fifty-four children.

 _Busy_.

The Emperor – on paper – decides no laws, but is the 'source' of batarian power, acts as final arbiter of any questions of justice or conflicts between two higher-caste batarians, and issues, on an irregular basis, various Decrees of His Will or Words of the Dark Gods. The former are basically commands that all batarians must adhere to or die. The second, more rare Words, are supposedly wishes of their deities.

The Emperor is curiously quiescent regarding the actual operation of the Hegemony, rarely if ever directly commanding the Hegemon in regards to colonization, diplomacy, or administration. The bulk of the Emperor's direct commands relate to mostly ceremonial and religious dicta. The Ministries work hand in hand with the Hegemon and the high-caste to govern in most cases and perform most if not all other actual governance.

On occasion, however, the Emperor will take a very direct hand when it comes to relations with Aria, the hanar, and a very few others.

The Emperor addresses all beings as his lessers except for two – the High Priest of the Dark Gods (the Minister of Religion) and – very curiously – the mysterious krogan doctor Ganar Okeer. I believe they have had at least one run-in with the doctor, but I am unaware of what, precisely their relationship might consist of.

Below the Emperor – and usually the ones who carry out his daily business – are the Eyes and Hands of the Emperor, the amusingly named Furkath and Mrithkah, or literally 'left-eye' and 'right-eye' and the not so amusingly named Crena'hakta and H'jamlor, or 'blood-dipped left fist' and 'right fist that crushes the heart.' All four are usually either brothers or second to fifth-born sons of the Emperor. The Eyes oversee the defenses of Khar'shan itself, while the Hands oversee the Imperial Guard.

Below this is the Hegemon, a sort of supreme military warlord, and the Hegemonic-caste, which is a midsize group of several other very large high-caste families. Hegemon-caste members make up all high officers in the military, intelligence, and what passes for military industrial companies in the Hegemony, as well as most colonial district governors. The Hegemon himself is the presiding official over the Court of the Highest, an elected assembly voted on only by high-caste batarians to represent the batarian people.

I need not point out how shatteringly laughable the concept that high-caste batarians actually _represent_ the needs or wishes of their inferiors is.

The Hegemony itself is broken up into five 'inner districts,' fifteen 'colonial districts,' and three huge 'border districts.' Each district is overseen by a governor – inner districts by Imperials, colonials by Hegemon-caste, and the border districts by high-castes. Each district holds a number of batarian worlds, mining colonies, and the like.

At the planetary level, each colony has two ruling officials – a Justicer, who administers laws and punishment, and a Chastiser, who oversees taxation and regulations. Beyond that, most governance is simply seen to by the high-castes, most of which style themselves as Fists.

* * *

 **The Court of the Emperor**

I might as well start here.

The Imperial Court is hosted and operates out of the Black Palace on Khar'shan, a heavily fortified structure made of glistening, heavily worked black granite that is over a kilometer and a half wide and towers a full nine hundred meters into the sky at its highest point. This facility is under a ring of heavy city-class kinetic barriers, ringed by GARDIAN towers and GTS defenses, and the back portion borders the Lake of Black, which is heavily defended as well.

Two, ten thousand-strong ghula (translated from Khar'shai as roughly, regiments) of the Imperial Guard guard this facility at all times, plus unknown additional forces. I would expect SIU, possibly Fist of Khar'shan, and probably other elite bodyguard units, as well as Beastmasters and their various pets.

Assault is _impossible_. Infiltration is impossible. Even P. himself has no footage of inside the Black Palace, and that one has video of the inside of Uressa T'Shora's bedchambers.

The Court is comprised of the Emperor, a number of High Ministers, and a select group of mid-high servants that have been bred to serve the Imperial family for a thousand years and almost look like Imperials themselves.

There are six ministries – Religion, Science, Habitability, Enforcement, Justice, and Tolerance – the last is covered separately, as this is their version of foreign affairs. I have commented elsewhere about batarian efficiency, and their government is no exception in this case. Each minister has total control over his aspect of the Hegemony, and they get their orders and directives from the Emperor himself. There is no complex hierarchical mess, no large groups of personnel.

The Religion minister codifies the various sayings of the Emperor and various prophets, publishes these religious materials and various books, haptic video, and other aspects such as long-range broadcasts. He also sets the religious observance laws and is the one who appeals to the Dark Gods for intercession, as he is also usually the highest-ranking priest.

The Science minister oversees all science, technological research, and (amusingly) interrogation of captured engineers and scientists, which is considered a form of research. They also perform a very large amount of archaeological operations in Batarian Space and out of it, although what they are looking for is obscure – usually they investigate sites well over two million years old. The Science ministry appoints various high-caste batarians to act as scientific observers on most batarian colonies.

The Habitability minister oversees all new colonization efforts, sets out laws for developing colonies, and (with a small staff) inspects all colonies to make sure they have a paranoid level of emergency supplies, surplus medical gear, and sufficient food and water production to survive being cut off from all resources for at least fifteen years. All guidelines on health (and most medical professionals or what passes for such) also answer to him.

The Enforcement ministry oversees batarian slave populations, as well as licensing slave holders, slave takers, slave breakers, and all of the various minutia involved with slavery. Oddly enough, they also are responsible for immigration (what little of that there is), emigration (even less, most of it illegal), and the distasteful sex tourism industry Pel mentioned in his write-up. The Enforcement ministry is unusual in that the minister is rarely ever an Imperial, and is usually a favored high-caste instead.

The Justice ministry has nothing at all to do with justice. It instead oversees the decisions and actions of the various Justicers and Chastisers, oversees tax collection, promulgates fee schedules and tariff requirements, and (in conjunction with the military) operates the border patrol and most industrial oversight teams.

I will cover the diplomatic Ministry of Tolerance separately.

The rest of the court is mostly assistants to the above, and a set of Imperial youths who act as couriers to the Hegemon. For the most part, the Imperial Court operates much like the human Ministerial Board, and the Court of the Highest acts as our Supreme Court does.

* * *

 **Government : the Batarian Hegemony**

As an entity, the Hegemony is classified by the Citadel as a 'totalitarian dictatorship with a few democratic elements.' This is for once actually fairly accurate.

The Hegemony as a whole operates on almost a dual axis – the actions of the Imperials and the actions of the Hegemon. Most of the day-to-day operations are not centralized, but are left up to local, planetary, and district governors. The Hegemony itself mostly acts to oversee the military and (to some extent) the SIU.

The vast majority of non-high-caste batarians have neither insight nor influence in their government, and even the high-castes only vote on a slate of beings to 'advise' the Hegemon.

In practice, the central government does very little aside from collect tax and tariff revenue and use it to maintain the military.

* * *

 **Government : the Court of the Highest**

As mentioned earlier, high-caste batarians vote once every decade to elect an assembly that represents their rights and desires to the Hegemon and the Ministers. On paper it represents all batarians. On paper, the batarian government also does not condone slavery.

Spare me.

The court spends the vast bulk of its time on litigation in various disputes between high-caste family groups, and in presentations of recommendations to the minsters of Science, Habitability, and (rarely) Tolerance. Most of the disputes are not solved by this calm discussion and high-castes murder each other in private honor duels almost daily, but all such blood duels are overseen by the Court.

In practice, a cleaned up version of the arena combats of the lower classes.

* * *

 **Government : Governors, Justicers, Chastisers, and Fists**

The governors that oversee sectors rarely if ever operate from a planetary surface. Like the Hegemon, most establish a fortified presence on a nearby moon, effectively ensuring the populations they oversee have no direct route to reach them in case of riots.

Planetary officials, on the other hand, live in heavily fortified compounds in close proximity to their populations, usually in a facility that also houses power, water purification, police units, SIU teams, and planetary defense controls, ringed with barracks.

Governors are mostly figureheads, merely collating reports from the various worlds and forwarding them on to the ministers. It is a position for more elderly batarian high-castes who are too old to participate in the main thrust of batarian politics, but have a large enough family to have the clout to not be dismissed into retirement.

Justicers are usually ex-military officers, heavily trained and with the firm mindset to deal with revolts or lawbreakers. Batarian 'law' is mostly laughable – punishment is almost always death or slavery (or worse). Those who cannot pay debts or taxes are enslaved until they are paid, those who commit larger crimes are enslaved permanently, those who offend a higher-caste are usually burned alive or have their eyes eaten before execution.

Even so, the Justicers demonstrate the batarian efficiency – despite what one would expect, most are scrupulously fair, even challenging the deaths of lower-caste batarians on occasion. Justicers are both hated and highly respected in batarian society, and the information we gathered implied it was one of the last holdouts of the 'older' batarian culture.

Their counterparts, the Chastisers, are more corrupt. They focus on taxes, fees, licensing, inspections, regulations, and the like, and most are simply looking for bribes. While Justicers are only selected from proud ex-military high-caste families of long repute, most Chastisers are less influential – sometimes even a Less High is a Chastiser on a backwater fringe world.

Chastisers live lavishly (for batarians) and are often the only government officials not in the Ministry of Tolerance that aliens will meet. We dealt with several in our travels, all greedier than volus and even less impressive. At least the volus attempt to better themselves with their VDF, the Chastisers are the distaff of the Justicers – weak, corrupt, and given to excesses and abuse of their position.

Pitiful.

The local lords are known as Fists, and most are high-caste familial groups, owning large tracts of land or, in some cases, most of an entire colony. Almost all batarian cities are centered around the main holding of a Fist, which is a modern-era defensive holdfast capable of supporting a population of at least fifty thousand for a siege of twenty years or more, or a much larger population for several months.

Fists group together into local bands of related interests and usually are the ones who deal with mid-caste small-holders and local companies. They also operate what passes for local police, usually mid-caste bullyboys leading a scrum of low-caste thugs in garbage from Batarian State Arms.

* * *

 **Government : Hegemony Military Command**

While I expect this will be covered properly in the military write-up, a few points stand out from a strategic point of view that need to be discussed for purposes of future operational plans.

The batarian military command is not unified. Most command chains pass from the Hegemon to senior admirals that operate a great distance from Khar'shan and are usually governors or high officials with a separate base of power. There seems to be no instruments to ensure loyalty aside from holding family members hostage, and, as I have pointed out, batarians show a lack of idiocy such as sentiment.

The SIU is an exception to this, see below.

Most military units in the Hegemony fall under the direct jurisdiction of the sector admiral, or the governor's appointed admiral. The Fist of Khar'shan answers to the Hegemon and the SIU to its own chain of command, but these units curiously have no oversight or control over State Guard forces or local militia.

The Imperial Guard does not interact in any way, shape, or form with any other parts of the military. Curiously, they seem like a sort of analogue of human Knights Irregular, except for the fact they only answer to the Emperor. Private military forces are often built-up by high-caste batarians of some wealth, but private ships above the size of a frigate or light-destroyer are forbidden to private owners without government approval.

Pirates and slavers get the bulk of said approvals and are seen mostly as an irregular militia force by the military planners.

The SIU has, as I said, its own self-contained officer and command corpus, and is often handled at a remove from other military and government units, as it is the group of batarians who deal mostly with outside influences. As such, at least one small detachment of the Imperial Guard is tasked with overseeing what the SIU gets up to outside of Batarian Space and is the only time any Imperial is far outside of their normal ranges.

* * *

 **Government : the Hegemon, the Eyes, and the Hands**

For the day-to-day operations, the Hegemon and the Emperor's high officials run most things.

The Hegemon himself oversees all non-Imperial Guard military operations on a strategic level, most resource planning, some legal issues, and acts much like a chief of staff or prime minister would. On the rare occasions the Hegemony engages in formal diplomacy, he or one of his Mouths will be the one doing the talking.

The Eyes of the Emperor are mostly fixated on observing events. The Left Eye is mostly concerned with colonization efforts on water worlds, why, we have no real idea. The Right Eye is concerned with archaeological digs, biotechnology research, math research, and other highly esoteric and seemingly unconnected fields.

Despite their seemingly odd tasks, the Eyes are widely feared throughout Batarian Space, as they have large staffs of various castes (even low-caste) that act as hidden observers and spies. The bulk of most slaves are overseen in secret by such spies, and the Eyes reportedly tell everything they find to the Emperor, keeping him well-informed.

The Hands of the Emperor take a more direct role. The Right Hand is mostly tied up with the slave training groups, slave holders, and with the Minister of Enforcement. The Hand has a staff of thousands of trained slave-breakers, and usually works to develop and tweak the programs used in obtaining, processing, breaking, training, selling, and other matters of dealing with slaves.

The Left Hand is busy with matters of what the batarians like to call internal issues – revolts, unhappy high-caste groups, smugglers not paying taxes, the Alliance Corsair program, and the border patrols. Much of what the Left Hand does is curiously ineffective, as if he does not truly care if things fall to pieces as long as the core of the Hegemony is unaffected. For all of his vast responsibility, the Left Hand only has a small staff to assist.

* * *

 **Government Services : Laws**

Pel made several mocking comments on batarian law. Most were sadly accurate.

The core of batarian law is the Collected Words of the Dark Gods and historical decrees of His Will, codified into a massive legal codex known as the Unseen Pillar. The book is actually freely published and available for download from the extranet.

Roughly half of batarian law is restrictions, guidelines, and regulations for slaveholders, slave-breakers, and the like. Another quarter is financial law, specifically laws about debts between castes and taxation clauses. The last fourth is split between criminal law and religious laws.

Most batarian laws are written very simply and clearly, so that even the dimmest of the low-caste could easily grasp it. A law that is too complex is usually removed. Laws are all linked to a related Word or Decree, then a simple description of the law and why it was needed, and finally, the punishment for breaking it.

Most punishments are corporeal in nature – imprisonment, slavery, death, dismemberment, maiming, being burned alive, being eaten, or worse. Most financial crimes are payable by fines or slavery, while breaking any of the religious laws is death.

The laws do not, oddly enough, seem to be written to enhance the power of the Emperor or the Hegemon; instead, they serve to give tools and guidance mostly to low and middle-level administrators and to act as a warning. Given that batarians do not believe in trials and that guilt is more of a function of perception than proof, this is not perhaps surprising.

But their trend towards efficiency in other areas is lacking here, and it feels, as Pel put it, 'fake' somehow. It is as if the entire legal system is pro forma and… for observers.

No matter.

* * *

 **Government Services : the Ministry of Tolerance**

Batarian laws and customs are very strict in interactions with aliens.

The SIU, of course, has the most interaction with aliens, and certainly the mid-highs that act as buffers for the high-caste often deal with traders, raiders, pirates, Aria's assorted trash, and unscrupulous customers.

That being said, ALL contact with non-batarians requires a member of the Ministry of Tolerance to be present. The ministry serves as the batarian diplomatic service, one leavened heavily with various ex-SIU or former military types.

The Ministry of Tolerance determines what slave races can be imported directly into Batarian Space and which ones must be sold outside. Any foreign trade deals, imports, exports, and eezo trades have to be reviewed by the office, and the very rare alien who wishes to live in the Hegemony must be vetted and cleared.

The curious thing about the ministry is the batarians there are very coolly professional, not evincing sexism, the usual batarian sneering superiority, or even the typical braggadocio. Why, we are not sure, as capturing one would be problematic at best.

I can say that the Minister of Tolerance is usually a batarian who is more open to alien influence than most others, and is often seen as the line for how far admiration of non-batarian items, people or ideas can be expressed.

Most interestingly, the Ministry of Tolerance is almost certainly in contact with various alien governments and probably the Citadel Council as well. While intercepts of communications are nearly impossible, we can make surmises based on various actions made (very subtly) by salarians that have thus far prevented the Council from acting on the Hegemony in a war capacity.

* * *

 **Government Services : Restricted Khar'shan Airspace (the Lake of Black)**

While technically not a government item, this needs to be mentioned.

The Lake of Black is heavily defended, and has a complete no-fly, no-atmo zone around the lake with a twenty-four-kilometer perimeter. Nothing, not even the Emperor, is allowed to fly directly over any part of the Lake.

There are many unofficial gardeners and 'caretakers' of the lands around the Lake of Black, mostly hereditary and free. They repair the various complexes around the Lake of Black frequently and help with ritual sacrifices at the water's edge.

I remain uncertain of why the Lake is held in such importance, but it may be a good psychological target.

* * *

 **Conclusions**

First, the layering of the batarian government seems very odd given their controlling impulses.

Second, the entire aspect of any kind of democratic underpinning has been slowly phased out consciously over centuries.

Third, despite having a functional government on paper, the Hegemony is really only defending its core colonies, instead of all of their worlds. As this further limits their resource flows, the why eludes me.

Fourth, and most concerning, is the relative lack of anything approaching a good night's sleep the closer we got to Khar'shan. Nightmares and, not to be melodramatic, at least one mutual hallucinogenic episode, convinced us to turn around.

The government is clearly a mess, but like most batarian artifacts of being, appears to be a decayed leftover of something much grander and less morally revolting, although I am hardly the best one to discuss the merits of relativism.

From a tactical viewpoint – they are vulnerable and disorganized on the fringes and this is seemingly something the Emperor doesn't see a need to address. We should take advantage of this.


	8. Chapter 8 : Batarian Military

**The Cerberus Files : Outcast Races**

* * *

 **Message Header: TYPHONET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE**

 **ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

Wistful Jack, mighty Richard, and serene Rachel,

The batarian military is a curious beast, one not forged of the conventional components, not utilized in familiar fashions, and with a strange focus on shock value, intimidation, and suppression, rather than military capacity.

I will admit I find military force to be dreadfully wasteful and inelegant, but I am not inclined to ignore the advantages it presents. Looking over the data we have so far gathered, one would expect to see a brute force of ignorant savages that engage in direct wave assaults.

This is not the case. While the State Guard may engage in such antics, it is clear to me that they are little more than what Pel dismisses as 'wall fodder,' units sacrificed in sieges or assaults to wear down opponents.

What troubles me in this is that, while it certainly fits the batarian mindset, it also makes them weaker, not stronger. I would think, given their psychological profile, they would want the strongest possible military – but neither the Hegemon nor the Emperor pursue that goal.

When the nexa does not pursue the dartfish, one asks what else did the nexa see that I did not?

 **Cerberus Thought for the Day:** _Pel taught me how to modify – or delete – this message. Again, shouldn't this be tidied up?_

* * *

 **Batarian Military Generalities and Mindset**

The batarian military is not, unlike most other races military forces, a singular beast with a singular purpose.

There are four distinct military forces in the Hegemony – the State Guard, the SIU, the Fist of Khar'shan, and the Imperial Guard. Each of these has distinct ground, vehicle, and space assets, highly distinct weapons and armor, distinct fighting styles, and, in most cases, distinct caste restrictions.

The most important aspect to remember about batarian military forces is, I find, often forgotten by my own people – the batarians do not value peace, but they also do not value conquest. Batarians fight to inspire fear and terror and to ensure a buffer area between their holdings and the territory of aliens. Batarians have never, in the recorded history of their species interacting with aliens, fought to invade and hold territory.

The military holds a curious position in society. Among the low-caste, military service is often the highest they can hope to rise in society, and offers them the highest quality of life and (alarmingly) the best odds of survival on a daily basis. For mid-castes, it is seen as respectable for young batarians, but career military choices are somewhat less preferable to mustering out and going into business.

High-caste batarians see the military as either a place to cover themselves in glory or as a distraction from feeding their own ego. The SIU does not count, since much of their membership seems to be either inducted from birth or put there by relatives who see the batarian in question as a liability (if high-caste).

In any event, the very purpose of the military for batarians is (like many other aspects of their culture) oddly bifurcated. The State Guard, of which Kai is so dismissive, is clearly a garrison force primarily intended for slaving, riot control, and general policing, not heavy combat. The somewhat polymorphic nature of the SIU (and the fact that, contrary to public opinion, they are certainly not 'less evil') is mostly expended upon indirect defense of the Hegemony through operations both tactical and psychological in nature.

The Fist of Khar'shan, then, is the only real military force that can project power beyond Hegemony borders, as the Imperial Guard has not engaged in combat with alien beings in living history.

It is important to note that, unlike asari and salarians, batarians delight in combat, especially melee combat, and that none of them shy from even the most shocking violence. Additionally, while the morale of low-caste units is predictably low, mid and especially high-caste batarians will rarely if ever retreat or surrender.

* * *

 **Batarian Military Doctrine : Ground**

Regardless of the nature of the force, almost all batarian ground forces share three commonalities – a strong focus on damage absorption rather than avoidance or mitigation, a tendency towards heavier weapons that maim rather than kill, and a shocking willingness in utilization of distasteful tactical options, such as poison gas or biowarfare, even if it kills their own soldiers.

Batarian military units are almost always general purpose – no forces are designed explicitly for attack or defense. They incorporate some non-military functions and are often expected to be able to operate without a good line of support, although batarian logistics is universally recognized as superior.

Batarians don't have specific stances aside from the sacrificial stance, preferring to eschew maneuver combat for direct charges.

Despite their somewhat dubious morale, low-caste units are impressive garrison forces, and higher units are almost impossible to dig out of fortified positions. Given their preferences for short-range and melee combat, and the general superiority of batarians against even turians in melee, urban combat is not recommended against them.

As with almost everything else about them, the Imperial Guard fits none of these – they fight at range, using a level of evasion and mitigation tactics that is almost salarian in elegance, and rely heavily on misdirection and traps to pin enemies down rather than absorbing damage and closing in.

* * *

 **Batarian Military Doctrine : Space**

Batarian military ships are inferior to almost all other naval forces, due to a mixture of lack of modern optronics from the embargo and the ugly fact that political infighting among the admirals of the fleet has resulted in a fragmented force.

Batarians value armor and the ability for ships to operate in a multifunction role. They do not place heavy value on heat mitigation, preferring to avoid long-range, high heat sniping duels to instead engage in boarding and close quarters GARDIAN combat. Batarian GARDIAN systems and ECM systems, due to their lack of optronics, are more vulnerable to ECM, but are also very difficult to hack indirectly.

Batarian combat doctrine focuses primarily on the use of the cruiser, especially the heavy-cruiser, as the edge of the blade. Their dreadnoughts are outdated and are more designed for orbital bombardment and area saturation, minelaying, and fleet support rather than direct combat, while lighter ships are used as screening elements.

In battle, these lighter ships will tie up missile forces and act to foul maneuver warfare, while the cruisers and heavy-cruisers close range and present a unified band of armored metal to mass accelerator fire. Once in range, the lighter ships will deploy mines to pin enemies in place and the cruiser sections will engage in breaching/boarding operations against targets of opportunity.

Dreadnoughts in these actions mostly focus on command and control rather than direct combat, although they are certainly willing to contribute long-range firepower and pick off ships carrying torpedoes, which are the major threat to batarian cruisers.

* * *

 **Batarian Military Doctrine : Ship Design**

As with every other part of batarian culture, their ship design is brutal, intended to project a sense of power and aggression.

Most batarian ships are made of blackened metal, a primitive form of the salarian laser steel process that still results in a very tough hull. The ships are shaped in an elongated arrowhead shape, with engine mounts at the back and edges of the triangular edge, and the front point of the ship thickened into an armor piercing ram that opens to reveal a dedicated boarding interlock and breach system.

The resulting ships are certainly menacing looking, while their highly angled shapes mean their already thick armor presents further cross-sectional distance to most mass accelerator fire. There is a heavy focus on redundant life-support and damage control, with the intent of simply charging through enemy counterfire to close to boarding ranges.

(As an aside, batarian boarding actions are incredibly fierce events, and even asari storm cruisers, specifically designed to allow for war priestesses and siari celebrants to board enemy vessels, do not fare well against batarian boarding parties. I strongly recommend the use of reactive breaching chargepaks such as the salarians employ on their own vessels.)

Given their focus on boarding, it should be obvious the ships are designed to carry large crews and boarding mechs, as well as equipment to fieldstrip captures for useful components.

Batarian weapons are often mounted on wide overlapping arcs, using a complex magnetic mount system to rapidly shift firing angles. These weapons are typically smaller than most navies' weapon systems, but use multi-stage munition blocks to increase their damage and impact.

Batarians also use a wide array of mines and other space denial weapons (ejected plasma fields, EMP bombs, micromines, and even sprays of corrosive black nano).

Batarian ships tend towards the roomy, but spartan; with low-tech, but numerous medical spaces, comfortable bunks, and fighting and exercise areas.

* * *

 **Batarian Military Organization : Sacrificial Stance**

Most batarian combat disdains careful maneuver warfare, seeing it as the province of those too weak to stand in a line of battle.

Batarian rank and file in the State Guard (or in the inelegant phraseology of Pel, 'rabble pissing itself in fear') are hardly going to be able to stand and resist direct assault, but the Fist of Khar'shan prides itself on rarely if ever breaking in combat, preferring to die fighting in most cases due to the arrogance of the high-caste.

When clearly overmatched, however, by either vastly superior numbers, superheavy firepower, or dedicated armor units, the batarians usually enter something they call the sacrificial stance. This bizarre formation places older, more heavily armed batarians in an inverted V-shape, fronted by rapidly laid shallow mine scatters and (if available) omni-mines and portable turrets.

Behind the 'V' will be whatever marksmen and longer range weapons are available to the unit, and behind that, the best heavy melee assaulters will be arranged in three reinforced columns.

The sacrificial stance is specifically designed to die fighting in such a fashion that the enemy pays a much heavier price than expected. The stance is usually taken up in such a position that the unit cannot be flanked, and they will throw murderous rains of fire down on attackers. Armor units are often fouled by the mines and the melee units will charge ahead and attempt to board tanks, or place direct satchel charges.

Every modern military recognizes the shape of the sacrificial stance, and even krogan are wary of charging home when the batarians assume it, for it is a sacrifice to their Dark Gods, that they plan to die in glory rather than surrender. You will almost never see anything less than batarian elites perform this, although we have footage of the brief battles in the Second Refusal War where a batarian State Guard unit, originally intended to merely guard the supply line, was cut off from turian and salarian flankers and set itself directly in the path of hanar heavy infantry.

They were butchered easily, of course, but the Hegemon had the bodies recovered and sanctified to the Dark Gods, immersed in the Lake of Black – an honor almost no low-caste ever achieves, and their families were honored – even today, they are among the best treated and wealthiest of the low-caste.

Do not assume the stance can be easily broken – artillery and airstrikes have only resulted in batarians charging while holding the stance, and they seem almost unnaturally unwilling to die while in it.

* * *

 **Batarian Military Ranks**

Batarian rank systems are varied based on their service. The State Guard has a simple five-rank system that roughly translates to ranker, veteran, sergeant, low officer (akin to a human warrant officer, the highest a low-caste can go), and captain (only for mid-caste).

The Fist of Khar'shan has but three ranks: Fist, Fist Sergeant, and Fist Captain.

The Imperial Guard has four non-officer ranks (Lowest, Tested, Proven, and Sergeant) and three officer ranks (lieutenant, captain, and commander).

The batarian fleet – regardless of the branch – uses a ten-rank system similar to that of most militaries, starting at recruit and topping out at admiral.

Batarian officers are mid-caste for the State Guard, high-caste for the Fist, and Imperial-caste for the Imperial Guard. Surprisingly, the fleet is more egalitarian, with low-castes who demonstrate great competence and bravery able to hold senior non-commissioned positions in rare cases, but all admirals are Hegemon or Imperial-caste.

The SIU ranking system is an arcane mess of titles that Mr. Leng apparently lost patience with attempting to decipher and simply denoted as 'embarrassingly melodramatic.'

Batarian promotions are only done based on brutal live-fire examinations, and command officers are ranked more on how vicious they are than how many men or ships they lose.

* * *

 **Batarian Military Units : Ground Forces**

 _State Guard Garrison Unit:_ Comprising almost twenty percent of the batarian combined armed forces, the batarian State Guard's most basic unit is mostly used to garrison colony worlds and frontier bases. Poorly trained and even more poorly equipped, these units rarely perform well under heavy assault, but can be a handful when they outnumber their foes.

 _State Guard Combat Unit:_ Typically long-service veterans stiffened by a core of mid-caste officers and heavy infantry, the combat units are deployed on naval vessels and are the primary opponent of Corsairs and border Alliance infantrymen. Equipped in the same wretched manner as their less experienced inferiors, these do have somewhat steadier morale.

 _State Guard Private Militia:_ Wealthy high-caste batarians often raise private militia armies. Pel implies that these should not be taken as lightly as the standard State Guard – while many batarian lords equip their men shoddily, a few kit their private armies out with modern weapons and armor imported by Aria, and a few even go so far as to utilize slaves to build custom weapons systems.

 _Fist of Khar'shan (FoK) Elite Combat Unit:_ The so-called 'meat' of the batarian army, the Fist of Khar'shan's legions are very well-equipped, murderously trained to exacting standards, and are easily a match for even veteran asari Republican Guards, Commandos, turian heavy infantry, or Alliance N-series units. The FoK ECUs are each named after a vicious hunting animal on Khar'shan and often stylize their gear and fighting style to reflect the animal's traits.

 _FoK Immortals:_ Elder veterans who survive normally career ending wounds are sometimes posted to this small ceremonial honor guard, which is mostly comprised of batarian cyborgs and bioaugmetics. Despite their age, these are some of the fiercest fighters the batarians have, and the Immortals have the honor and distinction of never suffering a defeat in battle.

 _Imperial Guard Regal Scion:_ The amount of information Kai and Pel were able to obtain about the Guard was very small, but they did discover it was split into two parts. The Regal Scions are assigned formal defensive duties for the entire Imperial-caste, serve on Imperial Fleet ships, and comprise the bulk of the Guard.

 _Imperial Guard Fell Guardian:_ The other segment of the Imperial Guard is dedicated solely to the protection of the Emperor's heirs and wives and the Lake of Black. Curiously, the Guard is not responsible for the safety of the Emperor himself. Kai reports every source and batarian interviewed (or 'convinced' to speak) found the idea that the Emperor needed bodyguards as utterly laughable.

Curious.

* * *

 **Batarian Military Classes**

 _State Guard Infantry:_ The lowest solider type in the batarian armed forces, this low-caste warrior is barely trained. Equipped with the batarian Ivkura rifle, a belt of grenades, and light Guard armor, they do not even match up well with green B-rate human Marines, much less fully trained soldiers.

 _State Guard Veteran:_ Any batarian who can survive a decade in the State Guard is classed as a veteran, and is upgraded to heavier armor and a Mashtok'a shotgun. Mostly used in direct assaults rather than attritional attacks, Veterans can be surprisingly cunning and are (by dint of living so long) both natural survivors and skilled in fighting.

 _Fist of Khar'shan Infantry:_ The 'baseline' batarian elite, FoK infantry train ten hours a day for years and are run through brutal training regimes under live fire for five hundred hours before they even see a real battlefield. Easily the equivalent of any other race's special forces, FoK infantry rely mostly on the DA-19 pistol, AC-22 Ripper SMG, and DA-5 Backsplash rifle.

 _Fist of Khar'shan Combat Engineer:_ High-caste batarians with a talent for demolitions and electronics are moved to combat engineers – who, despite the name, also usually double as comm techs and medical personnel. Usually equipped with the Kishock, they tend to not engage in direct melee combat.

 _Fist of Khar'shan Assault Specialist:_ Larger, stronger batarians are moved into the direct assault ranks, where they use the fearsome AT-12 Raider shotgun and a wide and ugly array of melee weapons, poisons, and other tricks to disable or crush their foes.

 _Fist of Khar'shan AUGMEK:_ Crippled batarians too torn up to even be an Immortal are forwarded into the ranks of the AUGMEKs, using the AUGMEK cybernetic battle-suit and a suite of heavy weapons. Most AUGMEKs are used in boarding actions and deep space combat – on standard ground battles, they are too slow and too much of a target to be effective combatants.

 _Imperial Guard Blood-Dipped Mace:_ Most of the IG is oriented towards traps and close to medium-range combat. Using shotguns and rifles specific to the Guard and wearing the Guard's distinctive black Carapace, they are careful positional fighters with a tendency to rely on traps and mines.

 _Imperial Guard Dread Beholder:_ The only known snipers in the entire batarian military, the Dread Beholders use the stupendously powerful 'Sword' sniper/anti-materiel rifle in battle. They prefer human-style 'one shot, one kill' targeting of officers and NCOs rather than salarian chip tactics, not surprising given the lethality of their weapon.

 _SIU Operator:_ Kai and Pel were not able to obtain much information on the SIU – a follow-up would probably be a good idea. Most SIU operatives we did observe focused on mid to long-range combat, mixing in units equipped with AT-12 Raiders and AC-22 Rippers into focused assault teams.

* * *

 **Batarian Support Units**

While most races have support units, you might say the batarian military is unique for both having so many and of such effectiveness. In particular, a KRITH mech literally costs less than it does to train a green SA Marine.

It is also curious (if not exactly surprising, given the embargo) that batarians use almost no military-specific vehicles – no tanks, no APCs, and no gunships, save a few they purchase from Aria.

 _Beastmaster:_ These are semi-religious types, trained to establish what batarians call a 'spirit bond' with particular animals upon Khar'shan. We have no details of training programs, only that Beastmasters can give simple orders and the beasts obey. They are only lightly equipped for battle, but carry a wide array of ugly melee implements.

 _Combat Beast, Stalker Beast:_ Used mostly for slave tracking, recon, hunting, and rapid shock assault, stalker beasts are two-meter-long four legged carnivores with four eyes (like their masters). Green in coloration, they blend in well with natural foliage, with a bite that can completely sever a human leg in one chomp.

 _Combat Beast, Fang Impaler:_ Small, leaping ambush predators with a powerful biotoxin injected into targets by their long and needle-like beaks, Fang Impalers are mostly used to flush out unarmored targets or harry and kill escaped slaves. Against any form of real armor the beak will simply shatter – but Fang Impalers have been trained to go for the face and eyes of aliens. These small (hand-sized) gray-furred creatures leap forward and up due to two powerful hind legs.

 _Combat Beast, Sky Ripper:_ An aerial hunter and scavenger, Sky Rippers are often mounted with cybernetic camera attachments and used for mobile recon at range. Their claws are over five centimeters thick and they can dive out of the sky and rake civilians or soldiers with no helmet with ease, often blinding the target to allow others to overwhelm and consume it.

 _Combat Beast, Abomination:_ The most powerful, disturbing, and rare of the creatures the batarians have ruined, the Abomination stands well over five meters tall, is covered in thick plates of iron-laced bones with a tough leathery skin below, and enough strength to fling aircars around. The batarian answer to war robots and larger mechanical foes, the Abomination regenerates very fast. While far too stupid to use most weapons, it can pick up sufficiently large tree trunks, light fixtures, or other debris and fling it with terrifying accuracy and force. Abominations are covered in black fur and exposed bone plating, and even locating their eyes in low light is difficult – fire works best against them, according to Pel.

 _Priest of the Dark Gods:_ Almost never encountered outside of Khar'shan proper, the priests of the Dark Gods are, at best, described as anomalous. While certainly not trained combatants by any stretch, they are often inspirational to other batarians and will stiffen morale just by being on a battlefield. More than that, these seeming civilians are very hard to kill – we have (blurry) video of one of them walking off a direct hit from an asari ADEPT rail-cannon, which should have reduced him to a rather jaunty mist.

 _KRITH Combat Mech:_ I admit that I am not very familiar with mechs, but even to my unpracticed eye these things look rather unimpressive. Skeletal frameworks of cheap plastic flash-forged with whatever metals are available, using 'baked' solid-state pre-optronic firmware and State Guard weapons and armor, KRITH mechs are hardly a match for even a skilled civilian hunter. The problematic part is their numbers – they are deployed in the tens of thousands, and according to Pel, an entire planet is given over to their manufacture. KRITH mechs are often put to gruesome use in suppressing slave revolts, but I suspect your Marines have killed more than a few thousand in various conflicts. KRITH mechs are also designed to (if you have the equipment) be upgraded easily – pirate and slaver bands often use them to augment their own forces or act as distractions for colony defense teams.

* * *

 **Batarian Warship Classes**

Batarian warship design is a curious thing.

As I mentioned earlier, batarians dislike direct maneuver warfare (no doubt due to inferior weapon ranges, pitiful heat endurance, and lackluster shielding). At range, their ships are substandard and vulnerable.

But batarian engines are robust and powerful, and letting batarian ships close range is a guaranteed disaster. Most batarian ships have their strongest, thickest armor facing front, and are specially designed for both ramming and boarding operations.

Batarian naval weapons are mostly purchased from Aria, consisting of older style disruptor torpedoes, segmented railguns, and standard (fifth generation, or roughly FCW-era) mass acceleration cannons. Their GARDIAN technology, on the other hand, is in-house and very efficient, using chemically-pumped argon lasers.

 _Raider:_ The rough equivalent of a police cutter or system patrol boat, this lightly armed ship is used mostly to police borders and ferry messages. The ship notably only has navigation kinetic deflectors, not battle kinetics, and only a single turreted mass accelerator. It does, however, carry as many as six external-mount anti-ship torpedoes. Named with the batarian equivalent of an alphanumeric code rather than a proper naming scheme.

 _Heavy-Raider:_ Despite the similar names, the heavy-raider is an entirely different size class than the much smaller raider. Roughly destroyer-weight, the heavy-raider is equipped for landing, boarding actions, and line combat. It has enough internal space to function as a slave-carrier, with excellent speed, maneuverability, and heavy shielding and armor. The weapons load (a single centerline heavy accelerator and two turrets) is light, but it also mounts external torpedoes like its smaller cousin. Usually named after famous slavers.

 _War Cutter:_ Built on the same hull as the heavy-raider, the War Cutter is an SIU-exclusive ship, lowering armor to fit more robust shielding, better engines, and heavier weapons. The smallest batarian ship to have internal torpedoes, the War Cutter also has ECM/EECM suites, scouting drones, and a full medical bay – all to support SIU operations. It has a much more limited operational range due to fuel consumption for the powerful engines, however, and lacks space for slave taking for the most part. Named after predatory animals on Khar'shan.

 _Light-Cruiser:_ As with most navies, the light-cruiser is the most common ship in the batarian navy. A nearly triangular wedge of a craft, the entire front edge is studded with heavy accelerator cannons and rapid-fire torpedo launchers, while down the sides are multiple GARDIAN arrays. A very well-made ship that rumor claims was a prototype for some Imperial Guard ships, the light-cruiser is (amusingly) more than a match for its heavier cousins. Always named after mid-caste warriors of high repute.

 _Patrol-Cruiser:_ The patrol-cruiser is also a common vessel, often acting as border patrol, boarding vessels, and light commerce raiders. Unlike the balanced and heavily armed light-cruiser, the patrol-cruiser sacrifices durability for endurance – it is rated to operate away from port for over a year. It is also the first batarian ship to feature the ramming brace/boarding interlock system in the prow, allowing it to ram a ship and board it through the breach. Usually named for rivers or lakes on Khar'shan.

 _Heavy-Cruiser:_ The batarian heavy-cruiser is usually an older model, surplus turian frigate (bought from Aria) overlain with a batarian superstructure, the inside cored and replaced with batarian fittings. As a result, this is one of their more powerful ships, although the amount of optronics needed to keep them running means many of them are in drydock. Fitted with six heavy mass accelerators, two torpedo tubes, and having the capacity for loading volus M/AM Spearfish missiles, the heavy-cruiser is often prized by high-caste admirals as a command cruiser. Named for batarian engineers of note.

 _Imperial War-Cruiser:_ The Imperial Guard's main ships, these are the same shape as most batarian vessels, but with an organic hull material and much heavier weapons load. How exactly these ships are being made is something we will have to investigate at another time – Pel and Kai were unable to obtain any real information on them.

 _Interdictor Ship:_ If the light-cruiser is the most common ship, this is the most hated one in the batarian fleet. Interdictors are roughly like battlecruisers, although faster and specifically designed to take in large numbers of slaves, suppress revolts, and (if needed) tow captured civilian ships. The ship has extensive GARDIAN array and multiple turrets on top of a pair of mass accelerators better sized for a dreadnought – but has poor handling, turning, and a fuel-hungry FTL system. Slaver clans often purchase these from the Hegemony to operate from – the ship is heavily armored and fast enough to escape most other heavy units that would overmatch it.

 _Dreadnought and Imperial Dreadnought:_ I am afraid Kai and Pel failed to obtain much in the way of information on either ship type. We have confirmed the batarians have five dreadnoughts, most of which seem very old and poorly equipped. The Imperial Guard has one dreadnought that almost never leaves Khar'shan's orbit.

Both dreadnoughts are built almost on (we think) similar floor plans and with similar safety measures. The main gun (a huge mass accelerator) does not vary. What is very different, aside from the crew, is that the dreadnoughts are seen more as relay choke points than participants in a line of battle. This means that a very clever commander could cut off dreadnoughts from the core regions, but it is suspected the Emperor at least has one or two more in cold storage somewhere.

* * *

 **Batarian Military Equipment**

Batarian weapons systems are both alike and unlike most human armories. They have a tendency – due to the lack of optronic VIs to manage their weapons – to use complex multi-stage rounds. These can include kinetic harpoons, shrapnel rounds, expanding fields of tanglewire, corrosives in solid states that liquefy on impact, and biological agents.

The batarians also employ explosives, with particular fondness for small grenades, mine systems of all types, and traps using spikes and other penetrative items.

Batarian armaments are sourced from three agencies. Most State Guard weapons and civilian weapons come from the infamous Batarian State Arms Corporation, specifically designed to be inferior enough to high-caste weapons to be useless in revolts. BSA weapons have flashy batarian names of various concepts like killing, blood, and other typical batarian nonsense.

The Fist of Khar'shan, the SIU, and most high-caste batarians and wealthy slaver/raider units buy directly from the Khar'shai Armory Corporation, which produces very competent and highly admired products that are immune to weapon hacks due to a lack of a VI. Their weapons are identified by a two-letter identifier and a model number that indicates the iteration.

The Imperial Guard's weapons, armor, and equipment are produced directly by facilities within the Black Palace, and we have almost no details on them. The set of equipment Kai Leng obtained early on melted into black biological goo within fifty hours, and the detailed scans we took of it before that continue to baffle both Minsta and Miranda. As we have no clear ability to identify the names of the weapons, Kai assigned placeholders.

* * *

 **Weapon Systems**

 _Urtek Pistol:_ The Urtek is a lightweight holdout pistol that uses chemical charges instead of a mass accelerator to fire low-explosive fragmentation rounds. While underpowered and useless against almost any form of hard armor, against unshielded and unarmored targets it is impressively effective, often pulping any lifeforms other than krogan.

 _DA-19 Heavy Repeater:_ A much heavier pistol, commonly used by the SIU and the FoK, the DA-19 is believed to be the gun the Blood Pack's Executioner was modeled after. Unlike that version, this has a three-round chamber and is fully mass accelerated, using a two-stage gyrojet round tipped with an armor-piercing breach-head.

 _Mashtok'a Suppressor Shotgun:_ The second most common weapon in Batarian Space and often found in slaver hands, the Mashtok'a is a bad and unwieldy knockoff of an old turian shotgun. While mass accelerated instead of chemical, the rails are typically made of soft, rather than properly hardened, metals and it is inaccurate even for a shotgun.

 _AT-12 Raider:_ Primary weapon of SIU squads, the AT-12 can shift from solid slug to spray patterns, stun rounds, acid sprays, and even flashbang rounds. Heavily built enough to double as a riot mace or to block an omni-blade, the Raider is often purchased abroad and is a common export.

 _'Claw' IG Shotgun:_ Our quick scan of this Imperial Guard weapon was inconclusive. Firing (as with all IG weapons) is clearly tied to DNA and skin scans, and the weapon was double-chambered, firing what looked like bone spikes filled with some form of flammable, toxic, and corrosive fluid. Kai was unable to fire it, but the rounds we managed to test (they did not disintegrate with the rest of the gear) – they blew a fifteen-centimeter hole completely through a set of Terminator armor. Engage units with this weapon at long-range.

 _AC-22 Ripper:_ Batarian State Arms does not make an SMG, but the SIU and FoK use this heavy submachine gun. Firing small explosive-splinter harpoons made of white phosphorous about two and a half centimeters long, you can imagine what this does in flammable areas or to unshielded targets.

 _'Fang' IG SMG:_ Built along similar lines to the Imperial Guard shotgun, the SMG they use fires shield-disruptive, armor-piercing slugs made of poisonous metals that fragment once they penetrate armor, ensuring even if one survives the impact, they will die from toxic shock reactions. The shield and armor-piercing capabilities are not as good as dedicated shield ripping or armor-piercing weapons, but combined with the rapid rate of fire and astonishingly long-range (for an SMG) they can cause gruesome damage.

 _Ivkura Combat Rifle:_ This is quite possibly the most common weapon in the entire galaxy, despite its less than mediocre accuracy and range. It utilizes a (rather primitive, if powerful) magnetic rail assembly and a cheap low-power mass accelerator, resulting in a lack of friction and excellent heat dissipation ability. This translates to truly frightening rates of fire (up to twenty rounds a second) and above-average penetration. The State Guard uses this almost exclusively in battle, while mercenaries, pirates, and slavers also use it extensively. It can penetrate even heavy armor, although it is rather short-ranged.

 _Seshura Marksman Rifle:_ Mostly used by private State forces, the Seshura is a cut-down version of an older salarian battle rifle that strips the VI and managed accelerator side-rail for an under-barrel grenade launcher and a reinforced stock to use for melee combat. Notable for being far more accurate and having a much longer range than the Ivkura, this weapon fires more slowly.

 _DA-5 Backsplash Combat Rifle: T_ he primary combat weapon of the Fist of Khar'shan, the Backsplash was designed by the same batarian who invented the Striker. Unlike the Striker (which was designed for export to krogan and then only later for non-krogan), the Backsplash uses stolen asari technology – they have built a primitive, but effective, plasma intake. The rifle generates plasma 'blobs' and ejects them through a film of omni-plastic, which prevents the bolt from destabilizing until it hits a target (or goes beyond around two hundred meters). The damage this weapon does – especially to both lightly armored Marines or equally lightly armored colonial militias – is almost always either lethal or immediately crippling.

 _SA-9 Striker Assault Rifle:_ In recent years, the SIU has focused on using this rifle that rapidly fires explosive mini-grenades. Good at cracking armor and taking out mechs, the Striker requires strong and heavy users to keep it on target, but is outstanding at collateral damage, and turns most boarding actions into slaughterhouses.

 _'Mace' IG Rifle:_ The heavy Imperial Guard rifle was built out of what Kai described as bone-like black biomaterial over a metallic framework. The weapon could not be fired, but (again) the ammo was not a standard block, but individual rounds, roughly two point five centimeters long and half a centimeter wide. These rounds were armor-piercing and fragmented on impact, scattering a biotoxin we have not been able to localize or identify. Testing shows less than ten milliliters of this substance will kill a krogan in _under a minute_ – humans have died in less than ten seconds from impact. A secondary spall layer of carbon absorbatives is what Pel recommends to counter this.

 _Kishock Harpoon Rifle:_ The ugly munitions of this weapon – a hyper-accelerated metallic spear that splinters on impact and then detonates the fragments – result in scenes of bloody carnage wherever it is used. It is such a heavy round that it quickly overloads both barrier fields and kinetic barriers, and the payload can be customized with explosives, poison gas, acids, and other dreadful substances. Luckily, its use is limited mostly to the Fist and the wealthier slaver groups.

 _'Sword' IG Sniper Rifle / Anti-Materiel Rifle: A_ lmost no batarian forces actually use proper sniper rifles, or so we thought. The Imperial Guard does. Kai and Pel were not sure if they should class this as a heavy sniper or an anti-materiel rifle. The weapon itself is made of a green-black crystalline growth that is apparently sawed off of some other objects and laid over a base with a handle and ammunition. Unlike the other weapons this was not genetically locked. Firing range is over two kilometers, with hits at that range blasting five-centimeter-wide holes in case hardened steel. The ammunition is once again that curious biological bone spike-like round, this time filled with an unknown biological 'gel' that seems to act as a super-high-explosive.

 _DA-11 Ruinous Powers Heavy Machine Gun:_ Rarely if ever seen off of Khar'shan itself, this is a water-cooled, intake-cooled, servo-controlled machine gun, used on vehicles or worn on an articulated brace by AUGMEKs. The five-barreled minigun portion is driven by powerful electromagnets, but it uses mass accelerated components clearly purchased from Aria, as well as Omegan omni-circuits and VI control – the only known batarian weapon that has such a thing. More than a match for the mighty Revenant or the human Typhoon, the RPHMG has enough power to penetrate Shieldbreaker frontal armor and can damage even heavy MBTs to a slight degree.

* * *

 **Armor Systems**

Batarian armor suits come in four main classes: lightweight ballistic vests with laser steel inserts, spider silk and nanoweave light combat armor, environmentally sealed heavy Fist of Khar'shan armor, and bio-symbiotic power-armored suits worn by the Imperial Guard.

 _State Guard Light Vest:_ Little more than black artificial silk under a black armored vest, this will not stop Avenger rounds, much less heavier weapons. Mostly worn by off-duty soldiers, police, and some rich civilians.

 _State Guard Armor:_ The standard combat armor of the State Guard is inferior even to Onyx, not having full environmental sealing nor onboard VI medi-gel management. On the other hand, the suits are much more lightweight, very comfortable, and have a host of survival gear built into them, including a water purification system. The frontal armor plate will resist several direct hits from an Avenger, but not much else.

 _Grukya Reinforced Armor:_ Typically worn by rich militiamen and mercenary senior officers or leaders, the Grukya is a refurbished suit of castoff turian or asari armor plates, hammered into shape over a soft-sealed environmental bodysuit and topped with a pair of low-power kinetic barriers. While superior to State Guard armor, it is hardly proper military equipment.

 _SIU Combat Armor and Fist of Khar'shan Assault Armor:_ Both of these suits are custom-made and nearly identical – environmentally sealed, with good kinetic barriers, omni-tools, and minor onboard survival systems. The SIU armor has less thickness and no onboard weapons, but incorporates a seven-second cloak field and a host of scanning and hacking equipment. The Fist version has an extra three centimeters of frontal armor plating, reinforced omni-gauntlet packages, and stronger communications gear, as well as a zero-g vacuum ready rating.

 _Fist of Khar'shan AUGMEK Battle-Suit:_ While far more primitive than even the older model Alliance battle-suits, AUGMEKs are dangerous due to being specially designed for deep space combat and boarding actions. A rather ramshackle imitation of the salarian Shieldbreaker, AUGMEKS are batarians who have been cybernetically integrated with their battle-suit – and a section of their brain removed to hard-splice in nervous-system control hardware. Fairly heavily armored and very heavily armed with explosives, fusion cutters, anti-infantry weapons, and the DA-11 heavy machine gun, an AUGMEK can take down most AGAMEMNON and SLINGSHOT Alliance battle-suits (although a THERMOPYLAE, and any salarian, turian, or asari suits are beyond their capabilities). AUGMEKs notably have no VI systems or onboard computers and cannot be hacked, another dubious advantage as it also robs them of targeting systems for the most part.

 _Imperial Guard Carapace:_ The scans we ran of the equipment Kai and Pel captured are still somewhat inconclusive. The Imperial Guard armor is made of an admixture of high-tensile carbon nanotubes, black chitin-like material, and plates of thick, black, bone-like armor, mounted to a bionetic framework that appears to hook into a batarian's body directly. Given the weight of the weapons it was carrying, we can only presume the suit is powered – although the power source (one of the only components that did not melt) is a flat silvery disc that even our most powerful sensors can't penetrate and, despite emitting a high amount of dangerous radioactivity, has no detectable ports or sockets to allow it to discharge.

We are continuing analysis – the disc (and what goo remains of the other equipment) is already being sent on to the Shadow Group, for Richard's scientists to examine more closely.

* * *

 **Defensive Systems**

The only one of note was the point-of-impact barrier shield obtained from the Imperial Guard corpse by Kai and Pel. We have no details how this could have been implemented, only that it seems to work far better than kinetic barriers and can repel even heavy firepower of the level Pel prefers for several seconds.


	9. Chapter 9 : Batarian Figures of Note

**The Cerberus Files : Outcast Races**

* * *

 **Message Header: TYPHONET ERROR – TYPHONET ERROR**

 **SUCCUBUS-THREE-THREE – CODE INVALID**

 **OVERRIDE: SIX-FIVE-FIVE-NINE-ALL-GOOD-ALIENS-ARE-DEAD-ALIENS**

 **SYSFILL SEEKING…**

 **…SIGNAL DETECTED. OVERRIDE IMPLEMENTATION.**

 **ONE-TIME PAD LOADING: PUBLIC KEY DKSJEIK-49890-DK1$$$4**

 **…LOADING**

 **SIGNAL LOCK. ESTABLISHING TUNNELED CRYPTSK CONNECTION PACKAGE.**

 **ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

 **BEGIN TRANSMISSION: RASA**

Mr. Harper,

I have picked up Operatives Pellham and Leng on the borders of downspin batarian territory. They were in the process of clearing the area when fast-mover STG pickets somehow identified the ship they were using – I suspect, after reviewing comms, that the SIU may have discovered their identity and helpfully forwarded this information to the Council.

Lovely, the SIU.

I was scheduled to meet with them to transfer the collected items from the batarian trip, since Brooks is still in deep cover in the AIS in preparation for an attempt at BREAKAWAY. When I arrived, the ship the operatives were on had taken severe damage and the engines were nonresponsive.

The STG ships were not expecting a Cerberus cruiser in the area. Nothing of any use or value was obtained from the wreckage of their ships, and no survivors remained of the STG team.

After taking on Pellham and Leng, I attempted to contact additional Cerberus forces for backup and medical pickup, but detected the BENEDICT signal.

As this was an Iron Cell vessel on temporary loan, I was lucky in that I saw it and that the CO did not grasp what it meant. I explained it was a high-level code indicating Cerberus was under attack (amusingly true).

I had the medics put Leng and Pellham into medical stasis. I then murdered the Captain, the executive officer, and the main engineer under the pretext of a command meeting to react to the Citadel/Spectre attacks we were seeing.

I activated the fire suppression halon systems across the ship and hacked out all controls. The crew is dead of suffocation, the ship is on autopilot. I will be loading what our operatives found into the ship's pinnace and head to the bugout safehouse at Vaarak III until further notice. The cruiser will destruct in six days – you can, if needed, transmit override code _55-aleph-9090-IVa_ to cancel the scuttling.

As an aside? I am somewhat perturbed by events.

I rarely if ever comment on the, ah, momentum or pacing of what Cerberus achieves. But I dislike being surprised. The BENEDICT signal was, I thought, not supposed to be triggered until we had solid information on whatever method Saren was using to dominate the geth.

Additionally, I thought we were going to attempt to subvert and control most Cerberus assets after General Florez and Lord Williams were incapacitated or killed. While I don't mind killing, it seems wasteful that we are going to have to throw away the Iron Cell assets (although I must agree with Pellham that Shadow Cell is not worth keeping).

I can only presume, given the fact that Brooks reports her cover is intact, but all other Cerberus assets are under heavy attack or are not responding, that we launched early due to outside action or unexpected events?

TYPHONET is no longer secure – I'm sending this via one-time pad. I believe the plan was to fall back to the secondary secure link system – please confirm.

* * *

 **Message Header: HELNET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **NEGOTIATING ARBITRAGE HEADERS…CLEAR**

 **SYSFILL 333932-ADD-SIX:** _Cross check complete_

 **HERA-THREE-NINE-NINE-SIX :: NOPE-NICE-TRY-3996**

 **CREATING HANDSHAKE…ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

 **BEGIN TRANSMISSION: ILLUSIVEMAN-1**

Rasa,

Good work rescuing Pel and Leng.

Your surmise is correct. We were forced to launch early – Shepard is more resourceful than she appears. She organized a strike against us exclusively through the STG and the Spectres, where we have almost no penetration, and Council forces were ordered by Spectre executive command with no lead time.

I managed to trigger our escape primarily by luck – Trellani and I are at the Denver Spaceport and will head to the Bekenstein location. I have attached a software package to load the HELNET interface to your transmission.

Kai Leng indicated they'd assembled rough notes on a final report on batarians of interest, particularly the Emperor. Once the situation stabilizes, remain in lockdown for at least ninety-six hours or until I contact you – you might as well use the time to analyze and transmit the final bits of the report, as we may need to utilize… unconventional strategies now that we are in the cold.

* * *

 **Message Header: HELNET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **NEGOTIATING ARBITRAGE HEADERS…CLEAR**

 **SYSFILL 8851241-SUB-TWO:** _Cross check complete_

 **SUCCUBUS-THREE-THREE :: RASA-33**

 **CREATING HANDSHAKE…ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

 **BEGIN TRANSMISSION: RASA**

Mr. Harper,

The past few days have been a mix of entertaining and less than productive. Mr. Leng will need major repair to his left cybernetic leg, and Mr. Pellham will require more specialized medical care at a later date, but both are stable.

The information they gathered from the Batarian Hegemony was fascinating, and rather than take them out of stasis (and subject myself to their bantering) I have attempted to provide my own analysis. Much of this is, unfortunately, highly speculative – and Pel and Leng are not the best choices at insight, although I do respect their instincts.

I have also reviewed the bionetic materials they recovered that melted into 'goo.' The reported uneasiness they reported is something I felt myself. I have sealed the items in an external cargo pod and would strongly recommend having them studied remotely.

I will list out the more important figures that stand out in the reports I have, roughly in order of their direct influence on batarian society and governance. Some of these I can draw conjecture upon, such as the Emperor. Others, like the Draug'Lir, are pretty much a blank page, and my speculations are limited to the scant facts we have at hand and prime targets for follow-up investigations.

As an advisory: your reply hinted at needing to cooperate (possibly) with elements of the Hegemony due our current status. I do not recommend this – not out of some childish sense of morals or other such amusing tripe, but simply due to the fact that we cannot ascertain their motive or their real ideology (assuming such is something more evolved than 'alien, enslave it, rape it').

* * *

 **Batarian Modes of Address**

Most batarian low-caste are called 'veth'hulk,' lesser free one. Mid-castes are 'vau'hara,' or 'free one.' Slaves regardless of caste are always 'dh'hara.'

High-caste batarians are referred to as 'vau'hakta,' or 'great one.' Hegemon and Imperials alike are 'avauh'kalak,' or 'high lord.'

The words 'vau' and 'veth' respectively mean 'equal' or 'lesser.' 'Avauh,' or 'high one,' is for superiors far above you, while 'avan' is for minor advancements.

Batarians use a wonderfully complex set of tough sounding appellations, which are awarded with neither rhyme nor reason by peers, superiors, or even social inferiors. The more titles a batarian has, the more important they are.

Batarians address all aliens as 'veth'jka,' or 'lesser trash,' although their translation software claims this means merely 'lesser outsider.' Very, very few aliens are ever prefixed with 'vau' – even by low-caste batarians.

The few exceptions are Aria, who has a specific title of 'vau'henkata,' or literally 'great princess,' and Doctor Ganar Okeer. Okeer in particular is hilariously titled; all batarians, save the Emperor, call him 'avan'ruakana' or 'high death bringer.' The Emperor himself calls him 'vau'sana' – implying the Emperor sees Okeer as an equal of sorts.

I agree with Mr. Leng that this does not sound like something we should be blasé about.

* * *

 **A Final – or Perhaps Initial – Conjecture**

Batarians are an interesting sort of semi-tame animal. Violent, boastful, and full of inventive and repetitive attempts at inspiring dread or fear, and yet almost laughable in their clearly battered levels of self-esteem.

Unlike the good doctor and the asari priestess, I do not find the batarians 'horrifying' or even disturbing. They merely are. You could make many of the same arguments, on some level, of human culture. Is the Emperor somehow more vile than, say, Ardiente? Is the Ministry of Enforcement worse on some level than the colonial powers that killed millions, or the Hand of Allah?

It never fails to amuse me that we give ourselves a pass when it comes to atrocity and then act outraged when others commit such acts. Moral outrage in a group where we assassinate our own religious leaders is very tiring and implies we're not being honest with ourselves.

Not that honesty is a virtue either… but I wonder. Apologies.

What I am trying to say is that batarians are what they are. Mr. Leng's point regarding their brutality aside, we are asking the wrong questions. 'Why' no longer matters when the situation has been going on for centuries.

We are missing the 'what,' not the 'why.'

What has shaped them, and twisted their culture, is probably either something beyond our understanding or a sign we are simply looking at them through the wrong lens, but ultimately, anyone in Cerberus should understand that aliens will repulse due to human psychology, not innate 'wrongness.'

We recoil from the dark.

We reject that which does not seem like us.

The entire reason that the asari are so beloved among our insipid and ignorant brethren has little, I suspect, to do with the fact that they saved us – and more to do with every other alien looking akin to something your children would shoot in an arcade game. The batarians in particular cater to this cartoonish sense of 'menace,' with their black leather and silk armor, spiky melee weapons, and gene-typed castes. Their flashy titles and nigh-unto turian levels of melodramatic acting to inspire fear.

But it is merely drama. It implies that they are less brutish and more aware of human weakness and psychology than, say, the Turian Hierarchy – and perhaps even the asari. Batarians may disgust due to their brutal actions and the way they treat females, but one must consider the flip side of this.

Every story has to have a point. And we cannot simply say the point of the batarians' story is to be repulsive without asking what got them to that point – and who benefits?

Ultimately, that question can only be answered by one being.

* * *

 **High T'hanakur Venkarith, Sixty-Seventh of the Line of Batar, Dread Master of the Endless Host, Lord of Night, Eternal Champion Ascendant of the Dark Gods, Unyielding Scion of the Fires of Vhsak'a, He who is Fear:**

Kai Leng does not give credit whence it is due to the batarians for being catchy with their naming schemes, dismissing it as useless frippery. Batarians see titles as important, and dismissing them is both foolish and naïve.

Then again, Kai has always had a problem with seeing the truth behind concealed distractions, which is no doubt why he was cuckolded by a woman who slept with at least four other Alliance officers while married to him and pregnant.

…It strikes me that perhaps you should not forward this to him?

No matter.

The Batarian Emperor is a figure who any and every scrap of data must be pored over and examined from all angles to grasp. From what we know of the meaning of the titles, this Emperor is somewhat more esteemed by the Dark Gods than the last.

In particular, the title 'Dread Master of the Endless Host' has not been used by any emperor for the past three hundred years. And 'Unyielding Scion' is an upgrade from 'Unyielding Aspirant,' which the last Emperor was, in the order 'of the Fires of Vhsak'a,' which is the Dark God of Violence and Blood.

For these changes in title to be meaningful, of course, indicates something or someone external to the Emperor is granting them – perhaps the High Priest of the Dark Gods. Without more context, we're flying blind – I will write up an additional analysis based on what I feel we can utilize in this.

In regards to the Emperor himself: he is, even for a batarian, large and powerful – standing well over two meters tall, massing what we estimate from images at over one hundred seventy kilograms.

This guy is _enormous_ , and none of it is fat, it's all hard muscle. I would not wager on even a krogan taking the Emperor in CQB.

His features are hard and lined deeply, chalk-white skin blackened on each cheek by a ritual brand from the Dark Gods, the features of a being twice his actual age. His eyes are a glowing white, narrow and cruelly amused. His long queue of hair falls down to nearly his ankles, and he wears little but ceremonial robes that leave much of his chest and muscular arms and legs bare, rich white cloth that is emblazoned with the Imperial Seal with red trim supposedly dyed in the blood of batarian heretics.

I am no more fond of aliens than any other Dog, but I admit this is certainly an impressive specimen in a physical sense.

The Emperor is young for a batarian, but most emperors die young. In images I obtained from the mass of data Mr. Pellham put together, two stand out. We have a single image of Venkarith two years before he became Emperor, at the birthing-day celebration of the previous Emperor. At that time, he was a full thirty centimeters shorter, probably at least ninety kilos lighter, and his face had a youthful cast to it, an almost arrogant smirk.

The Emperor's features today are set into a fixed, mocking sneer. It is the expression of one who knows something you do not; more, that his knowledge is what gives him a sense of events we cannot match. This is not the gaze of a brutish figurehead of a race of pirate rapists.

This is the expression of someone laughing at everyone around him, and not gently.

Of his habits, we know almost nothing. His life is encircled by vague rumors and hearsay. Stories of his ability to shrug off assassination attempts are common, as are unsettling stories of screams and worse coming from the Black Palace.

Of his personality, we know almost nothing. Aside from what we can extract from his direct actions, the Emperor is almost a cipher. Much of his daily actions would appear to be ceremonial in nature, yet neither the powerful Hegemon-caste nor the entirety of the high-caste have opposed him – a curiosity, given most previous rebellions before he came to power were usually led by disaffected high-castes.

Of his actions, we know only what propaganda and pirate batarian news stations manage to get out. His rule has been rocked by several revolts, which were put down in the harshest measures in batarian history. Entire cities were burned with everyone trapped inside. One non-garden colony was orbitally bombarded for fifteen days, until several continental plates had buckled and gasses from escaping magma had no doubt killed everything, even most of the plant life.

He does not tolerate dissent, especially attempts by his own people to reject his authority or to interact with the greater galactic community – but has sent his Mouth to the Citadel thrice in as many years, seemingly to probe the likelihood of rejoining galactic society.

The Emperor does not give interviews, does not interact with almost any except those in his court and (occasionally) the Hegemon, and his daily activities are impossible to monitor. For all of that, we know he is seen by the batarians as both cruel and something of a playboy, as his collection of wives is well over twice that of most emperors.

Any estimate of the Emperor's wealth is doomed to miscalculation, but he is probably at least somewhere close to that of most of the High Lords of Sol. In theory, the Emperor owns everything any batarian has, including their lives. In practice, the Black Palace apparently has a factory and other facilities that literally produce everything he and the court need on-site.

Which is a level of paranoia that even our High Lords haven't yet reached. I'm not sure if I should be impressed or wonder instead just why the Emperor needs such facilities.

In the final analysis, the Emperor is clearly a being who operates toward objectives we don't see or understand, and at a remove from batarian society. Given that one expects a brutal totalitarian dictatorship would have highly involved leaders, the fact that his only real actions are to obliterate disobedience would imply that his attention is… elsewhere.

* * *

 **The Hegemon, Highest Grand Sword of the Emperor, Kul'halak Bairak, Menacing Silence of Judgment:**

If the Emperor pursues almost ancient Chinese levels of inscrutability, the Hegemon is perhaps the most accessible figure to hold that role in well over a century.

Somewhat short and stout for a batarian, Bairak is still roughly as big as Pellham, and was a very feared operator in the SIU at some point. Bairak is almost genial for a batarian, having participated in two telecast interviews with the Citadel News Network, and has made vague statements about attempting to defuse hostilities with turian border elements pressing his people.

Of course, he is also known for encouraging batarian raiders and slavers to harry the border worlds, the Traverse, the Dark Rim, and anything else they can get to, and then smiling innocently and claiming these pirates were mutineers or some other story that should go into a collection of fairy tales.

Bairak is very politically adept – the election that put him in power was contested heavily as his sub-family was not scheduled to take the role of Hegemon for another two segments, but he prevailed after demonstrating his competence in obtaining a gigantic shipment of raw eezo, optronic circuits, omni-forge equipment, and medical gear from a daring series of deep raids that he himself led.

Most Hegemon act as if they are merely regents, but Bairak has spent heavily on reinforcing and expanding both the SIU and the Fist of Khar'shan, and attempting to retrofit the batarian fleet. He has been stymied by economics as well as production bottlenecks.

Unlike most high-caste batarians, Bairak is almost heretical in his appreciation of alien objects of art and décor. He is also unusual in that he is a talented musician by batarian standards, often performing with a selected quintet of Imperials and Hegemon for the entertainment of the Emperor himself.

My take?

He's waiting for something. He's not aggressive enough, given his past, and he's simply too agreeable, too easy for the batarians to approve of. Most previous Hegemon have either clashed heavily with the Emperor or the high-caste, but instead, Bairak holds high approval ratings.

Bairak is a leader who is limited in what he is allowed to actually accomplish. He has neither the resources nor the authority to engage in all-out war with the Alliance, instead focusing on skirmishes, terror attacks, slaver raids, piracy, and other petty assaults that are deniable enough that the Citadel will not act against him. His subservience to the Emperor is odd, given the independence and willingness of previous Hegemon to defy the Emperor's commands.

There is more here we do not see. Bairak is too experienced, canny, and ambitious to restrain himself like this unless there is a danger or threat to his life, and the fact that no such threat seems risible or even visible makes me question again just how much of the Emperor's mythic powers are actually, as Kai terms them, superstitious claptrap.

His wealth is substantial, but most of it is in art and precious metals, as Hegemon-caste batarians cannot hold lands or title off of the moon of Khar'shan.

* * *

 **M'kathra, Dark Master of the Path of the Dark Gods, Fifth-Brother of the Most Dreaded and Revered Emperor of the People, Unyielding Child of the Fires of Vhsak'a, Highest and Most Terrible Priest of Our Eternal Masters, the Dark Gods:**

These titles only get better.

Particularly 'Fifth-Brother' – he is the brother of the previous Emperor, and thus technically what passes for batarian royalty. Again, the titles are important.

M'kathra (and I have an impulse to call him Cathy for short) is old for a batarian, nearly seventy years of age, but still vital and fairly hale given the usual decrepit condition of elderly batarians. He has been training his replacement for over fifteen years and is likely to retire and commit some kind of religious ritual suicide in the next few months.

That being said, he may be the most powerful and influential batarian in the galaxy. The Emperor and Hegemon are ultimate rulers of the Hegemony, of course, but most batarians outside it are seen as heretics, traitors, and are (unless they are licensed pirates, of course) killed if encountered. This has, as you might imagine, not inclined most outcast batarians to obedience.

The High Priest, however, is revered by almost all batarians, even the most extreme outcasts, and rare is it to find one who would reject a direct command of M'kathra. The commands he issues in weekly sermons – trite if eloquent summations of the content of the Pillars of Strength, invocations of the supposed virtues of the Dark Gods, and so forth – are curiously apolitical and focus more on further twisting batarian culture and outlook than supporting any particular government activity or even the Emperor.

M'kathra's sermons are of what in human religions would be called fire and brimstone, full of dire warnings that batarians who don't embrace the will of the gods would find themselves 'without the protection of their Shadows' when the end times come. The nature of these end times is only vaguely alluded to, but piecing together over two hundred sermons has allowed me to construct the following points:

The end times are near, heralded by what M'kathra calls 'mockeries of the Dark Gods.'

The end times will consist of the 'blights of the galaxy' being consumed, while the faithful are 'protected from the demons.' Phrasing here indicates the event he is projecting would be some kind of physical invasion, not a metaphorical event after the death of an individual.

Those who don't embrace the philosophy of the Pillars will be 'open to the whispers from the Great Enemy' and as a result would be 'cast down to burn.' Some sort of brainwashing, perhaps?

The data we have is simply too sketchy at this time, aside from the fact that M'kathra is a very talented speaker and the sermons rich in highly evocative language. The descriptions of some sort of invasion by powerful beings from elsewhere are alarming, but also vague, and often seemingly shift from sermon to sermon in tone – sometimes dismissive, other times alarmed, and almost always urgent.

It must also be noted that this is a shift in the direction of what the High Priest has preached – in previous centuries most of their sermons were on the need for the batarian people to obey the Emperor's will, to support the Hegemony, and to rant about the inferiority of other races.

It is… curious to look at the trappings of the worship of the Dark Gods and compare it to the Neo-Catholic Church or even the Reformed Baptist-Methodist Union. Their religion is primarily instructions on how to live and how to please the gods. Ours used to be such a thing, and now is more akin to mere psychological suppression, a panacea describing how blessed our leaders are and extolling the virtues of submission and meekness.

The Dark Gods are deities who offer no heavenly rewards, and a great deal of punishment, that the batarians respect out of both fear and appreciation of might, and their churches are usually comprised of mere laypeople and led by rich priests who pay all the costs for the buildings and the services. Our religious figures have been twisted into feeble mouthpieces, and our churches into a lucrative business model and government propaganda outlet.

I mention this because M'kathra is also the Minister of Religion, and oversees all religious services and state chapels in the Hegemony. It is his influence that has made the current Church of the Dark what it is today, especially with a focus on preaching and ministry rather than cynical appeals to gathering money and taking advantage of the poor. While this is not a religion I think most humans would want to embrace, the fact that it is shorn of the hypocrisy that you see in our own is interesting.

The assistant minister is already in place and handling most day-to-day matters – as with the position of High Priest, it is likely M'kathra will step down soon. As his assistant minister is not his religious acolyte, apparently the two positions will not be held by the same batarian in the future, which raises the possibility of discord.

* * *

 **Crena'hakta K'mesh'ka, Serene Contemplation of Eternal Fury, Hand of the Emperor, Blood-Riven Mace of the Fury of the Emperor, Unyielding Child of the Fires of Vhsak'a:**

Commander of the Imperial Guard, K'mesh'ka is another batarian with a title for a name, lacking his own due to honorable actions. 'Crena'hakta' is his title as Left Hand, and K'mesh'ka literally translates to 'bloodthirsty nightmare.'

Even among batarians, K'mesh'ka is a figure of appalling violence, swaggering casual brutality, arrogance enough to make an Eldfell seem humble, and sneering dismissal of anything not batarian. As the Left Hand, he is occupied with external challenges to the Hegemony, such as initial responses to revolts and slave uprisings, directing the military logistics of the Hegemony, and other odd bits and pieces.

As Commander of the Imperial Guard, he mostly focuses on ensuring the high standards of the Guard do not slip and enacting increasingly psychotic and paranoid levels of security around the Black Palace and the Lake of Black. Kai Leng's assessment that infiltration was impossible is quite possibly the most vast and profound understatement ever uttered.

Even I couldn't see a way to get within eighty kilometers of the palace, and K'mesh'ka has enacted security measures like a three-kilometer-wide mud field constantly watched by automated cameras to pick up cloaked intruders, a one hundred eighty-meter-wide 'moat' around the Palace filled with bio-toxin smeared tanglewire, monomolecular spike traps floating in a suspension of poisoned fluids, random guard patrols, entire packs of Beastmaster tracking groups searching all parts of the palace and the surrounding area every hour, infrared and UV pickup cameras mounted on mobile drones tied to both a central command room with ability to dispatch strike teams and orbitally mounted kinetic bombardment systems, and more.

Given that K'mesh'ka almost never actually leaves the Black Palace, the information Leng and Pellham were able to obtain on him is sadly limited and more rumors than factual content. K'mesh'ka is known to be a connoisseur of female turian slaves, with his tower on the southern face of the palace supposedly housing dozens of them and with many dying in barely hinted at atrocities of either sexual or possibly religious nature.

Why not both?

* * *

 **Draug'Lir** , **Scion of the Throne of Black, Eighth-Brother of the Most Dreaded and Revered Emperor of the People, Great Master of the Intervention:**

This is a real piece of work. Draug'Lir (another title without a name) is the commanding officer of the Special Intervention Unit, the purported professional (ha!) batarian group that acts to ensure the stability of the Hegemony.

I'll believe the SIU is not as cruel as the rest of the batarian military when I believe the High Lords act out of altruism.

Draug'Lir is a big, beefy, alpha male of a batarian, even taller than the Emperor, if not quite so heavily built. Images from murals on Khar'shan show he's missing one eye – ritually sacrificed, a sign of favor from the Dark Gods, no doubt – and is otherwise a typical Imperial-caste male.

Mr. Leng and Mr. Pellham assembled a truly calamitous series of reports of the brutality of this figure, from his service as an Imperial Guard leader and bloody fighting on Khar'shan to exploits of his SIU teams to rumors of his brutal suppression of a mid-caste revolt where he personally killed and ritually dismembered dozens of batarians on live telecast and then had the mocking audacity to auction off their properties (and their now enslaved families) to other high-castes who wished to make sacrificial offerings to the Emperor.

Draug'Lir is the youngest living child of the previous Emperor, slightly younger than Emperor Venkarith and much younger than his other surviving brother, who is in charge of the Justice Ministry and what not. Unfortunately, we know little else about this one.

* * *

 **Kan'thar the Mrithkah** , **Right Eye of the Emperor, Fated Master of the Path, Minister of Science:**

The most reclusive and secretive of the high government officials, we don't even have a video capture or still image of this batarian. Highly placed in the trust of the Emperor, Kan'thar is in charge of the strange focus the Hegemony has on archaeological digs, and is what passes for a batarian scientist.

There is a curious paucity of any kind of rumor or even facts about Kan'thar, aside from careful observation of what his people do. Given our… current manpower situation in the fallout of BENEDICT, I doubt we'll be able to assign resources anytime soon to determine what the purpose of such is, but a few salient and disturbing points stand out.

First of all, I reported in the initial workup you had me perform on Saren and Lady Benezia, before we agreed to our limited partnership, that Saren had interacted with (and eventually arrested) a batarian high-caste scientist known as Edan Had'dah. Had'dah had attracted our attention even before the AIS coopted Cerberus, but Saren didn't interact with him until the 2170s.

From what we know, Had'dah was a direct subordinate and protégé of Kan'thar, and it's unlikely that the Right Eye is blind to whatever Saren is up to if Had'dah was involved. We know Had'dah spent a great deal of money on AI specialists, high-resolution scanning equipment, FTL lane mapping teams, and relay activation licenses. What we're not sure of (as with most intelligence work regarding batarians) is the motive for such, but at last we seem to have a smoking gun.

Had'dah's entire family was killed and his property sequestered by the Imperial Guard on the orders of the Emperor in 2170. Looks like at around the same time this happened, Kan'thar switched his focus from archaeological digs on Khar'shan and surrounding water worlds to wide-area searches of remote sites in the Traverse and the Skyllian Verge, with a particular focus on former Prothean colonies already picked over by Citadel salvage teams.

I usually like mysteries, as they make the story that we build out of what we find more interesting, but this is just baffling.

As to the batarian himself? As I said, we are operating in a sadly empty data deficit given his reluctance to leave the Black Palace.

* * *

 **Vrigo'r K'halak, Master of the Eternal Black, Blessed of the Imperial Will:**

The High Admiral of the main batarian fleet, K'halak is a middle-aged batarian with service in both the Imperial Guard and the SIU. Why he chose to step down from command of such elites to an administrative post overseeing the somewhat ramshackle fleet is a curious tale.

K'halak is considered by many batarians (and a good many other alien fleet commanders) to be one of the best, if not the very best, batarian admirals and strategic planners in the Hegemony. The reversal of fortune the Alliance suffered in attempting to retaliate for Elysium was mostly implemented by K'halak, who shattered 2nd Fleet's thrust at Morva V with inferior ships and weaker weapons by dint of superior strategies and ambush tactics.

Ninety-six percent of what the batarian fleet – standard and Imperial Guard – practice as standard operating procedures were written up by K'halak, and his book on the proper use of stellar geography is almost as widely sold outside of the Hegemony as within.

For all of that, however, K'halak is not in the best of graces. Unlike many batarians, he doesn't project a sense of arrogant dismissal. He has a bare handful of wives, and is constantly accompanied by a pair of female quarian slaves who he seemingly treats as technical advisers rather than anything less salubrious.

K'halak has been very outspoken in suggesting batarian military readiness is being sapped by the stupidity of suffering the blockade, and that the Skyllian Verge is worthless and certainly nothing worth starving the Hegemony of optronics, technology, and the like for.

His current post gives him little time to make such statements, as he is constantly attempting to keep a fleet working with perhaps, at best, a third of the materials needed, under the direct eye and constant interference of the Hegemon.

Do not mistake, however, K'halak's seemingly more reasonable stance for anything like an opening for dialogue. He has also publicly stated that humans are "not even as valuable as vorcha" for slaves and that the only reason the Council backed humanity over the batarians in the decision on colonization of the Verge was that humans were asari sexual pets.

K'halak is, however, reasonable towards the quarians, and is one of the reasons the quarian fleet is allowed (in return for a sizable tithe of the results) to mine and quarry asteroid fields in the 'border' sectors of the Hegemony. Given most batarians see quarians as weak victims too cowardly to die cleanly, his seeming respect for them (he has actually visited the quarian fleet twice in person) is… a little odd?

It galls me that investigating this won't happen soon thanks to BENEDICT.

* * *

 **Other Figures of Note**

There are a good dozen other write-ups that Mr. Leng conducted, most of them ministry officials, military officers, and the occasional wealthy high-caste merchant, but none of them strike me as truly influential.

Likewise, there are clearly influential persons (the Left Eye, the other Hand, various generals) that are clearly important enough to need a closer look, but that we simply lack any data on or the ability to obtain such.

Given batarian paranoia, insular culture, complicated language, and alien biology, our chances of sneaking in a disguised operator to obtain additional information is, frankly, very low. None of these persons are important enough that not having an assessment should damage your planning, Mr. Harper.

Besides, whoever stocked the ration locker on this pinnace filled it with nothing but Alliance standard MREs and, in what must be some kind of sick vengeance from the grave of the personnel on the cruiser I killed, Alliance ration biscuits.

I'll end the transmission here, clear datum, find a decent place to eat, and then proceed at top rated speed as indicated earlier to the next bugout location – which is I believe is Ferris Fields.


	10. Chapter 10 : Batarian Miscellany

**A/N: WARNING:** _severe spoilers in this section._

 _As with all of the OOC sections, this one illustrates that which Cerberus cannot see on their own._

 _While some information on the Ascended in general is available elsewhere, most of the information about the Black Leviathans will come out in the main story. So the spoilers are not really 'spoilers' as most of this won't be seen anywhere else._

 _The elements here are, by and large, not necessary to understand what is going on, but will allow you to grasp more of the why._

* * *

 **The Cerberus Files : Outcast Races**

 _ **Out of Character Notes : Batarians**_

* * *

 **Beyond the Veil**

The batarians, at first glance and close inspection, are revolting. The question becomes: why?

As with the hanar, the answers come from the depths of time, but instead of a mild-mannered and regretful source of wisdom and contentment, only madness leaks from the dreams of the Dark Gods.

* * *

 **The Black Leviathans**

The battle of the Ascended (more commonly known as Leviathans) with the Darkness was, as indicated in other documents, long and violent. The frontline of the battle was held by countless subject species clashing with armies of the Darkness's own thrall-components, and by the Ascended military under the command of Katha against the bared and unnatural might of the Darkness's 'host.'

Katha's soldiers were forty of the toughest and most physically powerful Ascended, clad in powerful battle armor with weapons that could wreck a galaxy and built-in connections to Godpower savants further back. A full tenth of the race was devoted to protecting the others, and each one died only at great cost to the Darkness, both in thrall-components and in power.

But fall they did, one by one. Some fell in physical combat, others in Godpower-fueled catastrophes that tore entire galaxies into smears of dark matter and scattered baryons, still others were driven to madness and death by the sheer mental assault of the Darkness.

At the last battle over Ilthar, when the Catalyst betrayed the Ascended by turning the Reapers he'd made of various subject races against them, much of the race died. The military did what it could, but the commander, Katha, was struck down by the Darkness itself and believed dead. The multitude panicked, the Reapers fell back, and the military was abandoned to hold the line.

Most of them died fighting. Twelve did not. Overwhelmed by the Darkness and the vision of what happened at the last battle, even those mighty figures reached a breaking point. Their minds shattered by what they had seen and the sheer power of what they fought, they fled screaming into the eternal night of deep space.

They spent a million years in torpor, nursing their wounds.

Almost all of their gear and weaponry was destroyed, and they were soldiers, not scientists or Godpower experts. They clumsily healed themselves as best they could, patched together what they could, and began attempting to rebuild some form of defense for when the Darkness came down on them again.

It took them half a millennia of running and hiding to realize almost any strong use of the Godpower sent waves of power through reality, forming a signal that the Darkness reacted to with crushing force. Abandoning the galactic cluster that was being torn apart by the Darkness and its thralls, they fled again, this time wandering for a full one hundred thousand years before moving to a smaller galactic cluster.

Here, they began – carefully – making further repairs, mining, and gathering resources. They engaged in this tedium for untold ages. Their minds were damaged, but even so, they were more cunning than a thousand mortal races. They used the Influence to set up locations far from their bases, testing to see how much Godpower could be used before the Darkness showed up.

It was by one of these trials they discovered the Reapers, and over time, their Severity that hid Godpower usage.

The Black Leviathans did not have the technical skill, resources, or patience – much less sanity – to set up such an elaborate hiding system. They instead moved to one of the galaxies under Reaper control and set about rebuilding their resources, with a loose plan to either coopt the Reapers into taking the fight back to the Darkness, or destroying them and absorbing their power.

Over the millions of years that passed, they observed the Reapers, and made their own influence felt. Countless races worshiped them, primitives who they influenced in the dark times between Reaper culls. Dozens of races were shaped by the former soldiers, and in turn their primitive beliefs resonated with their masters. Reapers who found them were swiftly and brutally crushed, and then the Ascended would go into hiding again, laughingly turning aside weak Reaper attempts to locate them with fumbling Godpower searches.

The soldiers were hardly Godpower experts, but compared to the Reapers they might as well have been.

The onetime defenders of the Ascended were now without masters or a goal. Their first task was simple – butcher or dominate the Reapers, avenge the betrayal of their race, and seize control of the masking technology for themselves. Then they'd decide just how they would kill the Darkness, and restore their race.

Their goal, however, was difficult to achieve. The Black Leviathans could easily defeat the Reapers in open battle, crushing dozens of them. But they could not hold onto these gains, being forced back by sheer numbers and weak if gradually more effective Godpower usage. Unwilling to lose more of their kind, they withdrew, abandoning their holdfast in the Lesser Magellanic Clouds to instead inhabit the Milky Way.

They bided their time, seeking out refuges in deep water worlds and using what Godpower and technology they had to hide themselves. One would stand watch while the rest slept, gathering power, regenerating damage, and slowly spreading the Influence far and wide. They used races to gather resources and to spy out what the Reapers were up to, rather than expose themselves directly.

For six million years they bided on the world known as Carcosa, turning its inhabitants into monsters and the world into a charnel nightmare. Isolated for long years from the Reapers' mass relay network, the Black Leviathans twisted the species under their control into horrors the likes of which even the Reapers were not fully prepared for.

The Reapers discovered Carcosa and attacked, but this time the Black Leviathans were ready, and Harbinger himself was nearly destroyed. In the end, sheer numbers won the day yet again, although the attack set the Reaper plans back dozens of cycles due to losses.

One of their number died, but bringing down just one Leviathan cost the Reapers a full tenth of the force they had. Carcosa was blasted until nothing remained but ruins and smoking rock, the seas incinerated – but the rest of the Black Leviathans had already fled.

 _To Khar'shan._

For all these years, they have slowly twisted the batarians, using what they learned in their last battle to good effect. They have captured Reaper tech and even a Reaper corpse, using it in an attempt to rebuild the battle armor they once wore, fitting the Imperial Guard with technologies no other race of this cycle could match.

But they took a more direct hand in the species this time. They shifted their culture through dreams, nudged their evolution with delicate touches, and as their planned soldiers evolved and changed, finally decided to create a tool to allow them to change the batarian people to their liking.

Thousands of years ago, a single batarian mystic wandered the shores of the Lake of Black, a lake with ice-cold liquid that was too thick to be water. Nothing grew next to its black-sand shores. No fish swam its dark depths, no birds wheeled above it. Only the Pillars flanked it, dark black and inscrutable. This mystic wanted to know why. And when he found out, by being unfortunate enough to be the first link the Black Leviathans made, his mind was broken as badly as his masters, and then when it reformed it became something terrible, dark, and evil.

Over time, what the batarians have become is not entirely the fault of the former soldiers of the Ascended. The Emperor is also to blame.

* * *

 **The Emperor, and the Plans of the Black Leviathans**

The mystic that they linked to that day on the shores of the Lake of Black is the same being who inhabits the flesh of modern Batarian Emperors. He is no longer mortal any longer, his very existence and being shaped and made manifest by the will of the Dark Gods, the Ascended.

The Emperor, along with two other mysterious figures (the Augur and the Unseeing One) are fragments of the original mystic's mind, bound to a biological framework around an influence orb. All three are merely puppets, and when the body of one of them dies, their replacement or descendant is taken to the Lake of Black, to have their minds blasted clean and replaced by the thing that is the true Emperor. The Emperor's actual body is submerged in the muck of the Lake of Black, maintained by Leviathan technology and sealed from any possible attacks.

Killing the puppet-avatars he operates through does nothing but force him to take another body. In this, the Emperor has taken on some of the traits of his masters. The Ascended like to operate through avatars, through representatives, as it makes them both less vulnerable and capable of assessing threats long before they are localized. Given their current wounded state, their use of the Emperor and his empowerment is but a fraction of their might, and it serves them well.

The Emperor is augmented much like Saren and Benezia were, with self-replicative nanoware that can rebuild him from nearly nothing. He is also a permanent channel to the Black Leviathans, as the miniature influence orb on his standard allows them to project Godpower through it at great distances with little to no 'noise.' Fighting the Emperor is simply impossible for a being not empowered equally by Leviathans – no weapons can permanently hurt him, and only the most powerful warpfire can destroy the nanotech he is made of.

The Emperor's focus is on gathering the resources the Black Leviathans need to finish healing, build weapons systems, armor systems, and other requirements. The fate of the batarian people is a distant afterthought, the rest of the galaxy an irritant and distraction in most cases. The Emperor has gone beyond madness in the thousands of years he has been linked, and his actions are not driven by logic mortal beings can understand, which is why the Hegemon has such a free hand.

It must be emphasized that the Emperor is _still possessed of his free will_. The Black Leviathans warped him, but he is fully aware of his actions and chooses to follow the will of the Dark Gods. There are no depths of depravity or evil he would not descend to in order to maintain his power and that of his gods.

* * *

 **Imperial Guard Technology**

The darkest secret of the batarians is the technology used by the Imperial Guard, biological artifacts of incredible power. The truth is that every piece of such tech is Leviathan in nature, specifically an aggressive, programmable linked symbiotic lifeform that they build using captured slaves.

Tens of thousands of slaves, both low-caste and alien, are sacrificed every year to provide the raw materials for these technologies. Smaller pieces are literally grown into slaves, slowly cannibalizing the living hosts and warping their remains into biotoxins and the like. Larger pieces are built off of frameworks with slaves embedded within, tendrils growing into their flesh and converting such slaves to basically gigantic cancer colonies that are shifted to the needed end product, be that armor plating for an IG ship or sets of armor.

No non-Imperial batarian, much less any outside power, knows any of this. The Imperial Guard are all fully conditioned via influence orbs, utterly immune to indoctrination, and are unmatched by any other military force save the most prepared and hardened of the hanar priesthood with direct links to Katha himself. Huge stockpiles of more advanced weapons and armor as well as literally hundreds of more advanced vessels are stored deep underwater or in distant abandoned stars, guarded by IG ships and bases.

The Black Leviathans' plan is simple enough. When the Reapers attack, they must either transit through the Citadel Dark Relay, the Alpha Relay, or the Collector Base Relay. The latter is only large enough to allow a slow trickle of forces, and the Citadel is effectively shut to them.

The Alpha Relay is connected to a Reaper artifact, an Eternal Pyramid in battle configuration that the Black Leviathans have very slowly and carefully tampered with. The Reapers did not bother to check if it was still working during the Prothean subdual, and now the Pyramid is infested with Leviathan biotech and the asteroid it is in has become an experimental horror show, where batarian scientists under the Influence study beings force-indoctrinated by Reaper tech to see how to counter it.

The Leviathan of Dis, a Reaper that discovered a Black Leviathan base and was killed, has been dragged to Khar'shan and is being dissected. The body itself is being carefully examined to produce a form of battle armor for the Black Leviathans, while the other technology is being carefully repackaged to prevent indoctrination and traded to Aria, P. , and others with an eye to raising the overall level of technology in the galaxy prior to any Reaper invasion.

When the Reapers come, the strike force they send to the Alpha Relay will get shunted instead to the middle of a star the Black Leviathans will then instantly trigger a supernova in. Survivors will be stunned and badly damaged, and used for spare parts. It will take the Reapers years to arrive using FTL, and if they use a Godpower conduit the Black Levithans have studded inactive reality anchors throughout Batarian Space. They plan to turn these on and entrap a larger Reaper force.

Once they have enough Reaper corpses to build a network, the most technical of the Blacks is convinced they can easily hack into the Reapers themselves and reset them to obedience mode. Harbinger can't be shut down this way, but Harbinger alone without other Reapers cannot defeat even a single Leviathan soldier.

The rest of the galaxy will likely be wrecked by the conflict, and the Darkness is likely to be attracted. The Black Leviathans plan to steal a few relays to figure out how to build their own Severity field, then evacuate with their batarian slaves using the Alpha Relay to 'hurl' themselves far away, leaving any surviving Reapers (if they can't command them) to distract the Darkness.

* * *

 **The Dark Gods Themselves**

Currently, three Black Leviathans are awake and working, while the other eight are sleeping. Despite their best efforts, Balak and Ivthak didn't succeed in destroying a single one, although they lightly wounded a few.

The nominal 'leader' of the Dark Gods is Sharn, who the batarians call Vhsak'a. In the days of the Ascended, he was in the Pantheon of Battle; his domains being direct conflict, overwhelming power, fire, and speed. Sharn is the most 'sane,' if that word can be used, of the Dark Gods, and the one with the most Godpower and technical ability.

Sharn is ambivalent about the survival of Katha, but is deeply alarmed and disgusted that Lethath has survived. He hasn't informed Katha of this fact yet, since he cannot determine what Katha's reaction might be. Sharn's attitude toward the batarians can be summed up as malevolent amusement – he sees their brutality and evil as strengthening factors that will help them resist Reaper domination. They are useful tools, but little more than that. That being said, the rest of the galaxy's races he finds disgustingly weak and utterly revolting in their disunity.

Two other Leviathans, Tahmo and Cirneya, are less stable. Both were lesser pantheon figures in the heyday of the Ascended, twin gods focused on ravaging the enemy, cruel and brutal combat, and the concept of fear. Both were heavily wounded and are mostly busy with finishing up a medical center to heal their own wounds and that of the sleeping Leviathans. They both hate Katha and Lethath and would prefer to kill them now and worry about consequences later. They are more appreciative of what the batarians have become; they delight in their subjects' cruelty and dominance, and see their charges in a more benign light than Sharn does, almost how Katha views the hanar.

The rest of the Leviathans are sleeping, as they do not heal quickly and many of them are still mentally damaged. They dream, and these dreams suffuse the very fabric of reality around Khar'shan and several other worlds, twisting the population's nightmares and inducing them to shape mini-Pillars in supplication to their gods. Despite being wounded, they are not helpless – even in their current condition, a single one could kill a dozen or more Greater Reapers.

The Dark Gods do not bother intentionally warping the minds of their followers. Nor do they attempt to protect their followers from their dreams. On the whole, all of the survivors were of the same pantheon of death, war, fear, and other negative impulses as Sharn, not the more positive one of Katha. This has not improved over time, and the Dark Gods are closer to omnicidal and malevolent demons than most races conceptions of 'gods.'

* * *

 **On Batarian Culture and Its Decline**

The Black Leviathans learned from their previous thralls on Carcosa that rapid and hard use of the Influence damaged the minds and creativity of the thralls. They took their time with Khar'shan, modifying the batarians physically as well as mentally over time.

The rich musical culture of the batarians was once equally rich in highly evocative oceanic art, a more flexible use of castes, and much less distinct physical differences. In particular, the high-caste, while warlike, was also capable of altruism, peaceful reflection, and didn't see themselves as better in the olden days.

The Black Leviathans do not actually care about cultures, and may not even grasp the concept any more than you can grasp the concerns of the countless one-celled germs on the surface of your skin.

That being said, some of the decline is due to the Emperor, who maliciously wants the batarians to be as cruel as possible, to echo what he has become himself. _He_ places no value on alien life, on the lives of females, and on anything that doesn't glory his masters – and culture has shifted to match his expectations.

* * *

 **Batarian Social Interactions**

For the most part, low-caste and mid-caste batarians inside the Hegemony live what passes for everyday lives. Most of batarian society is designed to isolate castes and allow only the minimum of inter-caste interactions.

Most low-income businesses, small farms, rockjack miners, and other low profit sorts of operations can be run and owned by low-caste, but almost all other business interests are run by mid-castes or higher. In businesses with lots of manual labor or data entry, low-caste workers are overseen by mid-caste managers, with the high-castes off-site for the most part.

People confuse the ideal of caste with how the batarians view each other. A high-caste looks down on a low-caste, true. However, even the most evil and vile high-caste batarian would rather live with low-castes than cohabit or deal with aliens on a daily basis. The low-castes resent their betters and often revolt, but this is due to their lack of dominance, not actual hatred.

* * *

 **Batarian Food and Drink**

Batarians love spicy food. While they don't eat much plant life, being mostly carnivorous, they grow a wide array of peppers and a fruit called gh'kta which is loaded with a variant hydrocapsaicin.

Batarians like pastries, usually baked meat pies and other stuffed meals, and often enjoy fishing. Fish are filleted and soaked in pepper juice and spices, dried into strips, then baked in interwoven layers with cheeses, mushrooms, and breads.

Batarian liquors are very strong and are extremely spicy and hot, sometimes leavened with lots of sugars to make them sweet. Batarian brewmasters are valued outside of the Hegemony as batarians deride any kind of standardization and all such drinks are hand-brewed and unique.

* * *

 **Batarian Romance and Sexuality**

Batarians have a homosexual male subculture, mostly among artistic types and those not expected to achieve high levels of dominance. This is more along the lines of ancient Spartan or Khymer trends, of a younger male and an older male.

Most such couples are a mix of close friendship, mentoring, and support system, the older batarian guiding and teaching the young one. Sexual drives among batarians are constant but low; most such relationships have indirect sex acts or engage in intercourse with female slaves simultaneously.

Batarians do not have a word-concept for 'romance.' That being said some batarian outcasts have embraced such things. Notably, low-castes and mid-castes are the most likely – almost none of the very rare high-caste recidivists bother with it.

Despite what most outsiders think, batarian ideals about sexuality are rather staid. They, like the asari, don't assign much actual importance to the act itself, more the dominance and position implied.

* * *

 **Batarian Females**

Almost all batarian females are barely sapient. The average one is roughly on the same developmental level as a four-year-old human child at best, and many are even worse off than that. Batarian females do not have a good understanding of the world around them, and most of their concern is toward their mates.

Despite the seeming cruelty males display toward females, batarian females are dutiful and obedient to their male figures. Some of this is by evolutionary pressure, but most of it is actually cultural.

Batarians (females and males) have an extremely limited window of learning in their youth that drives cerebral complexity. Batarian males are given intense, high-tempo educations – females are only taught to speak. If batarian females are given the same sort of education, their intellectual capacity rises to that of perhaps a young teenager.

* * *

 **Batarian Cannibalism**

Cannibalism is a ritual religious component of batarian life – outcasts never practice it. For the most part, it is reserved only for other batarians.

There are four aspects of such cannibalism – eyes, heart, entrails, and brain. Each one has a different ritual significance. For example, eating the heart of another batarian is a compliment to their life, as it suggests absorbing the 'power' and 'anima' of the batarian. Eating the eyes is an insult and a degradation.

Batarians only very rarely eat other races, as to do so in any fashion is actually the highest sort of respect they can offer. By doing so they indicate the alien in question was almost good enough to be a batarian, and by eating them, induce them into the cycle of batarian reincarnation.

* * *

 **Batarian Views on Music**

Music is the highest positive influence in batarian daily life. The Dark Gods, even the dreaming ones, like music and a tenth of the Black Palace is given over to a massive slave orchestra and performance group who have been singing and playing unstopped for the past five hundred years.

Most batarians see music as the only way to express emotion, and all batarians see music – their own or alien – as the only true method of understanding one another. The batarians like the music of humans the best, then turians, then volus, and asari. They dislike salarian and drell music and absolutely hate elcor music for the most part.


	11. Chapter 11 : Quarian History

**A/N:** _Quarian history is always going to be a mess, but I've done what I could._

 _TWCD should be updating Sunday, October 8th! This will tide you over until then, hopefully._

* * *

 **The Cerberus Files: Outcast Races**

* * *

 **Message Header: HELNET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **NEGOTIATING ARBITRAGE HEADERS…CLEAR**

 **SYSFILL 493337-SUB-SIX:** _Cross check complete_

 **HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE :: TRELLANI-699**

 **CREATING HANDSHAKE… ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

 **BEGIN TRANSMISSION: TRELLANI**

* * *

Beloved,

While I am saddened our small vacation together due to the collapse of Cerberus is now over, I am pleased to report none of my own projects seem to have been affected. There was a good reason why I kept my own little messes quite separate from yours, aside from distrust of Williams and the late unlamented Rachel.

I do recall pointing out some time ago that a relli does not cease to be poisonous simply because one has put it into a terrarium. And that simply having the antidote to its bite does not mean one should let themselves be bitten. The events of the past month – especially what it seems Matriarch Benezia was actually attempting to pull off – should be a sharp reminder to you that excess in any fashion is unhealthy.

I, myself, remain in some state of shock. Benezia was… instrumental in me becoming involved in the Temple of Athame, and was both a mentor professionally and a sponsor of my own business and archaeological interests. The idea that she, of all the people I know, would actually think enslavement or worse under the Reapers was better than fighting… does not match the person I remember.

Then again, Benezia was always a hypocrite. The Triune was little more than the sneering dismissal of any intelligent being to find a meaningful path in life not determined by Benezia's whim, and to call it 'patronizing' (or perhaps, 'matronizing') is an understatement at best. I remain astounded Aethyta did not simply murder her – I can tell you that while Aethyta's appetites have created more than one bastard purebred, you'll never hear a single rumor of her being unfaithful to Benezia, while the reverse is not true.

And now I am engaging in asari gossip. Forgive me, the past month has been a whirlwind of events I am still attempting to sort through.

According to the good Doctor Minsta, we have never actually bothered to do a field assessment of any kind on the quarians. Up until this point, I suspect this was due to pragmatic necessity – a ragged band of what he calls 'gypsy thieves and flea market engineers' was probably not a high Cerberus priority. Despite the size of their Migrant Fleet, much of it was simply useless in any line of battle due to the age and decayed capacities of the ships in question.

As we have now seen, however, their so-called Heavy and Scout Fleets were fully capable of engaging even superior geth ships. While the quarians have taken staggering casualties – seventy thousand dead, two hundred thousand badly wounded, and fifteen thousand left medically incapacitated – alongside severe ship losses of over five hundred vessels, they remain a power.

A power which, I might add, is hardly likely to view the asari, turians, or salarians in a kindly light, given how the Citadel treated them for the past few centuries.

Now that they have a seat on the Citadel Council alongside humanity, Minsta seems to think they can be manipulated for gain. I submit that attempting to do so without a deeper understanding of the quarians is doomed to failure, although I agree with the basic premise that he has. The quarians, unlike the salarians or my own people, have no convincing reason to compete with rather than cooperate with humanity, and the worlds they need are often useless to humans.

Thus, while I have been waiting for you to contact me, I've amused myself by pulling together some of the needed information for a full Cerberus File, which I understand should have been planned alongside the batarian and krogan pieces. Myself and Agents Brooks and Rasa have located a facility on Caleston, which should serve for our investigation of the quarians.

Quarian history is fascinating. No matter what lies or smears the Thirty may spread about me, I was one of the premier historians and archaeologists of my people, and my interest in such things has not waned so much as been set to one side. It amuses me to be able to indulge my curiosity in such a report.

Since I have not lived among the quarians as I did with the salarians I fear much of this report is likely to be somewhat speculative. I've interviewed several quarians, both fleet and outcast, and one elderly outcast in particular provided some information that seems to clash with the 'official' history.

 **Cerberus Thought of the Day:** _Wisdom is in knowing when to avoid what seems like opportunity._

* * *

 **Historical Overview : Known Prehistory**

Quarian history is a curious field of study, as there are simply no possible methods of performing conventional archaeological findings given the fact their homeworld is crawling with billions of geth. While _some_ information was, of course, gathered while the quarians interacted with the greater Citadel society in the years before the Geth Rebellion, the fact remains that Rannoch was strictly regulated in allowing any alien beings to visit it. Indeed, it was only my own studies that gave me the opportunity to see the world in-person, and even then I was certainly kept far away from archeological digs for religious and cultural reasons.

That being said, the quarians are a curiously backward looking and ancestor-obsessed people, and in their flight from the homeworld, took time to make sure they had a clear picture of their biological ancestry and origins. And what we do know of their prehistory is curious.

In particular, a Doctor Venla'Caan vas _Shental_ was able to provide me with scans of prehistorical evolutionary ancestors of the quarians and much of their known biological origins, the results of which were… intriguing.

Quarians are very closely related to turians, although not as tightly as humans and asari are related. If you removed the metallic plating from a turian, what you would have would very closely resemble a quarian. Based on the information from the genetics, it's very possible quarians were perhaps an offshoot of whatever 'original' baseline creature was used by some later alien to create the turian people.

This is, of course, speculative, beloved. Doctor Caan was careful to note that her research was… controversial, to say the least. While the fact that the Message exists is no doubt why the Lords of Sol were so accepting of the concept of asari as cousins, the turian and quarian mindsets are not so similar. Fleet and Flotilla notwithstanding, there is more conflict than consorting done between the two.

And I digress once more.

What little we do know about quarian prehistorical times is sadly limited by not only the lack of archaeological access, but quarian superstition. (For such a technically minded people, their beliefs are nearly krogan in simpleminded silliness.) What we do know paints a picture of a race that evolved to survive a somewhat harsh world.

Idiots have described the world of Rannoch as 'arid.' Having walked upon its shores and cooled my feet in its streams centuries ago, that is only accurate if one ignores the oceans and seas that cover a large portion of the world. The ancient quarians were, even before recorded history, clever engineers. Quarian historians suggest that while quarians only mastered fire half a million years ago, they'd built crude boats and canoes as long back as two million years ago.

Prehistoric quarian settlements were done by large, clan-based formations of loosely related families. There was, much like the asari, sharp differences in the clans that eked out an existence in the inland plains and mountains and those who sailed the seas, but the nature of such has been sadly and tritely summarized by quarian historians as merely cultural posturing.

* * *

 **Recorded History : the Athorak Empire and the Rhaan Confederation**

Seventy-two hundred years ago, a band of quarians with a talent for organization and raiding terrorized the coasts near the center of Rathah, the central continent. Bold, daring, and, if the legends are accurate, innovative, these pirate nomads smashed the nascent agricultural civilizations along the coasts to burning ruins.

At some point, a warrior of the coastal tribes, Athorak Zora, united a large number of warriors from other tribes and even some from inland to meet the invaders, themselves led by a chieftain-queen known as Urasi Rhaan. (Quarians have some level of sexual dimorphism, like most races, but unlike almost all others, have no history of any functional differences in leadership between male and female.)

Zora and Rhaan clashed a dozen times in pitched desperate battles before Rhaan was defeated and captured, her fleets scattered and most of her tribe of outcasts and criminals executed. Before she could be brought to justice, however, she somehow escaped (and there are legends about said escape that I will come back to, later, in the cultural notes).

Athorak used this as an excuse to further organize the tribes, and in ten years they formed a crude but effective nation-state. Writing and tally-keeping had been around before this point, it seems, but was done on wooden slates in animal blood, and were not kept. Athorak was the first to have important information (such as the 'official' history of the Empire) instead inscribed on stone slates and stelae, some of which the quarians still have on display in their liveships.

In the span of perhaps a decade, Athorak and his tribe-nation absorbed a dozen other tribes, using the escaped Urasi Rhaan as a casus belli each time. Eventually Rhaan fell in with the surly and insular mountain tribes of the western continent, marrying herself to some chieftain-king there who refused the demands of now Emperor Zora to hand over the 'criminal.'

The mountain clans, threatened by the expanse of the tribes under Athorak, banded together in a loose confederation. This in turn prompted Athorak to further unify the quarians under his leadership, and in year one of the quarian calendar, he raised the standards of what would become the Athorak Empire.

Much of the history of the Empire is legends, fables, and stories, filled with conflicts against the evil and debased Rhaan Confederation. Ultimately, the two continued to expand and absorb other tribes.

Five centuries after the death of Athorak, the Empire covered almost the entire central continent. Meanwhile, the Rhaan Confederation, much more loosely organized, only held half the land of the Empire – but its ships owned the seas. The two continued to battle and fight over meaningless issues until other problems overtook them.

* * *

 **Recorded History : the Dark Times**

The quarian historians were reluctant at best to explain why the Empire fell. Quarian exiles, on the other hand, were more than happy to share the story.

The virtues of the Athorak Empire were ones any turian would recognize – loyalty to the Empire, self-sacrifice, honorable combat, and pride. The Rhaan Confederation, on the other hand, valued cunning, intellect, flexibility, and bravery. (Amusingly, modern quarians intermix the two.)

With quarians mastering iron, and later steel, weapons and armor as the two nation-states clashed, the primary differences between the two grew more pronounced. At some point, the Rhaan Confederation underwent some kind of civil war, with the Rhaan family being exiled and, ironically, having to surrender to the Athorak Empire.

Legends say the clan who took over the Rhaan Confederation was one of evil magicians. I'd normally give this sort of thing a pass, but it's clear from the fragmentary descriptions that some kind of cache of alien technology was on the planet, as the 'firelances' and 'rays of darkness' described in the legends seem to be some kind of primitive energy firearms.

Quarian archaeological studies have found traces of alien ruins, a culture that was probably destroyed by Reapers, on Rannoch. Most of these sites showed signs that primitive quarians had discovered them in early history. While much of what was there was unusable until their Golden Era, it seems clear that a few hand weapons were probably brought into play.

Whatever the reason, the results were not good. An assassin from the newly renamed Dawn Confederation assassinated the Athorak Emperor and slew dozens more in a nighttime attack on the capital. In response, the Empire invaded the Confederation, going from a war of skirmishes to outright invasion.

And in many cases, atrocity. Both sides indiscriminately killed civilians, it seems, and it took over a century for the Athorak to finish off the Confederation. Hundreds of thousands of quarians were killed over this nonsense. Entire cultures and ethnic groups were brutally wiped out, and the Athorak Empire shattered.

Broken into squabbling nation-states, the quarians descended into a time of bloody warfare and genocidal retribution for almost three hundred years. The 'magicians' were finally killed in this internecine mess after long years of fighting and the 'firelances' either lost or destroyed.

With the Empire destroyed, the remaining groups of power slowly warred more conventionally over another century before peace was established.

* * *

 **Recorded History : Bright Era**

The peace of what would become the Quarian Communality was set in place by the end of the warring period, with the five largest nations coming together to deal with issues threatening the entire race. Cities were smoking ruins, millions of quarians were homeless, and what primitive infrastructure they had was shattered.

The three strongest nations allied with two of the weaker but more technologically advanced nation-states to form the Communality, a loose supranational organization much like humanity's United Nations or the salarian Sparak agreements. The nations banded together their armies and forced peace onto the world, then combined their labor and intellect to repair the damage.

It took a long time for the divisions of quarian society to heal, particularly racism (a curious affection, and the only other race aside from humans to discriminate on skin color and facial features). Quarian society was extremely fluid during these years, but for the most part, the effort was on recovery.

A few human historians (such as the good Doctor Minsta) have attempted to draw parallels between the Bright Era and the European Renaissance. That would be in error, as the events and driving forces behind it were more akin to the rebuilding of Europe after World War II or the recovery period after World War III and the Days of Iron.

There was no flowering of art, architecture, music, or travel – indeed, there was a decay of these things, a retrenchment into 'older' and 'better,' more conservative themes and times. Rather than increased freedom of movement there was an arterial hardening of all aspects of the quarian people and nation-states.

Indeed, the pace of technical innovations also slowed down. The main changes in the Bright Era was a repudiation of war as an acceptable tool of government, and yet a rejection of 'civilian' rule as being capable of preventing war. It was this time that led to the formation of what was then called the 'Command' and, in the modern era, the 'Admiralty.'

The five nations slowly absorbed the other smaller nation-states of their world until they stood alone upon the stage of global politics. It wasn't until this was completed that efforts turned from rebuilding and social renovation to creativity, and even then, it was creativity harnessed to purpose.

* * *

 **Recorded History : Industrial Era**

In most species – salarian, asari, turian, elcor – the rise of industrial technology and the widespread use of machines in farming was a reaction to calamity and need. The salarian was struggling to survive the Collapse. The asari were driven to it by the War of Queens. The elcor were dealing with an ice age.

Again, humans and quarians are alike in that your movement into industrial eras was more of serendipity and ease of life. The quarian nations, now at peace, established stability and economy scaled to the point where the invention of various labor-saving devices was merely the result of an expanding people.

Quarian industrial focus was on farming and construction, and devised all manner of extremely clever devices – reciprocal circular internal combustion engines, wirelessly transmitted electrical power over long distances, and the like. There was less of a focus on communications – radio eluded them for centuries – and more on sheer creativity.

The rise of industry also divided the quarian people more along socioeconomic lines, which sadly began lining up with racial divides. While the majority of quarians were 'silvers' – thin plating atop the head, silvery skin coloration, longer jaws, narrower eyes – the ones who created the most wealth and innovations were 'blues' – a darker skin coloration and wider eyes, a more arched cast to the features and thicker plating in places as well as longer claws.

The blues ended up dominating the nations, despite being a minority, especially the lines of the so-called Greater and Lesser Families. Blue-silver crossbreeds, known disparagingly as 'seafoams,' ended up forming a middle class that separated the two.

Religion also underwent several shocks during this time, with ancestor worship ending up being the most common, combined with a philosophy that at times seems somewhat like siari, and at times somewhat like zen. The mantra of this belief system seems to be 'accept what is real, reach for what could be, fear what could go wrong,' which strikes me as a touch… pragmatic for a religious belief.

Trust the quarians to make sure even their religion is utilitarian.

* * *

 **Recorded History : Majestic Era**

The (comparative) unity of the quarian nations ended up slowly improving their world even as technology became rapidly more advanced. Their first robotics attempts and use of automation increased standards of living for everyone, and with that, there was finally a flowering and expansion of the quarian culture in the realms of dance, music, literature, and creativity.

Given what happened later, it is no surprise that some quarian historians call this the high point of their species' history. Amusingly, very little hard information is known about it, and what is available has the ever-present smell of carefully crafted propaganda.

The bulk of what we know about the era is literally drowned in the cultural aspects – most modern quarian culture seems to always be based around some aspect of this era.

On paper, this golden age was peaceful, yet the military's size was increased by a factor of ten from reports and histories still available. Quarians experimented with various land and sea military concepts, chemical weapons, and nuclear devices – hardly the kinds of things a unified, peaceful group of nations would need to work on.

Ultimately, aside from the fascinating cultural and artistic outpouring of this era, I cannot draw any real conclusions as to what or why there was so much of a focus on military matters. I can say that, based on fragmented evidence, it is clear that the quarian leadership of the time became increasingly isolated from the 'common people,' and it was at this time that vast gulfs in prosperity first arose among the usually communal cultures of the day.

* * *

 **Recent History : Space Era and Citadel Interactions**

Given quarian ingenuity and curiosity, once they developed heavy industrial capacities, it did not take them long to begin to explore space. This started roughly nine centuries ago, but the first three hundred years of the quarian space era were marked by slower-than-light capability and increasingly weird experiments in attempts to create a working FTL drive.

The quarians had a prototype device that functioned much like a one-time use Sinsai drive (I believe the human term is 'Alcubierre drive'). Without eezo, contractions of space-time fabrics in this fashion appear to have been quite dangerous – the origin of the geth was a network of simple machine remotes to pilot these one-shot craft into nearby stars.

One of these ships alighted in a system seven light-years from Tikkun, where the remains of an ancient starship were found. It is critical to note that this spaceship wreck was, by all reports, not a Prothean wreck, nor was it Inusannon. Quarians remain remarkably close-mouthed about it, but exiles have gone on record stating the vessel was in excess of a million years old.

Quarians expended a staggering amount of effort, lives, and capital in reaching the wreck and examining it, and came to learn of eezo and mass effect FTL from the wreckage. It is also believed the distinct quarian electroplasma weapons and some of the computer architecture quarians used in later geth models came from this wreck, as well as several alloy composites unique to quarian ships.

The quarians were not, it must be stressed, an expansive species. Being within the Perseus Veil had hidden the reality of the greater galaxy to them, as the Veil is not only opaque to light, but saturated with the stellar remnants of several novae, making X-ray spectrography difficult. It wasn't until the quarians achieved FTL that they realized they were part of a larger galaxy, a revelation that had unsettling effects on the quarian psyche.

The three centuries of one-shot explorations and waiting years for survey responses via radio meant they had believed themselves alone in some small broken off cluster. While they could see other galaxies beyond the up-spin curve of the stellar arm they were in, they did not apply this to their own situation.

Thus, with FTL in their grasp, the quarians were very slow and cautious in exploration. The paucity of dextro-compatible planets in the Veil only amplified their lack of expansion – five hundred years ago, they only had five colony worlds after a century of exploration.

The initial quarian contact with an outside species was, amusingly enough, the hanar. The hanar told the quarian explorers in no uncertain terms to depart their space and not trespass, and apparently pointed them in the direction of the Citadel.

Quarian historical records state there was a great deal of confusion and chaos in the aftermath of finding other alien beings – riots and rebellions. A large portion of the quarian people were convinced alien beings would be untrustworthy, and the cool reception and utterly alien nature of the bag-like, eyeless, faceless hanar only exacerbated this.

Thus, rather than the civilian government, it was the quarian naval military command that took the lead in further exploration, establishing a series of forward bases outside the Veil and routing all traffic through carefully concealed paths. They mined all known relay approaches to their space and made sure they could fall back if further contact was violent, then proceeded down-spin.

Quarian military forces encountered both asari and turian forces on patrol near the edge of the Veil where it skirted Aria's territory and made first contact. Initial contact was wary, as even in those days the quarian fleet was very large, if nowhere near as advanced as the asari and turian ships.

It took almost two years for quarian diplomats to establish a presence on the Citadel, slowed both by internal governmental bickering between the quarian nations and the Council's usual bureaucratic ineptitude. Quarians were nervous in those days – I remember the first quarian I met was almost clawing holes in her pants from her unease.

In the century that followed, the quarians cautiously engaged with Citadel society as a whole. They quickly mastered Citadel tech and began modifying and improving it, bringing about a large leap forward in technology in many areas, from cybernetics and electronics to certain VI aspects. Quarians were the primary drivers behind graybox, whitebox, and the now-illegal redbox technologies, as well as many other cybernetic systems.

Keep in mind, in those days, quarians wore no suits. They always had the suits in space, as they feared decompression due to their open ship deck plans, but did not wear them outside of that – nose filters or filmy face masks were the most that was needed back then, although a few quarians had stronger reactions and simply did not leave Rannoch.

The quarians did not mesh well with Citadel races. They clashed constantly with the salarians, becoming infuriated at STG penetrations of their space. They deployed some form of nanonic plague on Rannoch that was harmless to most life, but lethal to salarians (as they did not allow salarians of any kind on Rannoch, and I was one of a very few asari to even set foot there) and returned the bodies of one hundred seventeen salarians to the Salarian Councilor, threatening war if they attempted such things again.

They also clashed with the turians and the Council overall in terms of fleet size and their alarming use of redbox AIs, which they refused to outlaw. When the turians suggested throwing them off the Citadel, the quarians responded with unconcern while mocking him for ignoring the fact the batarians practiced slavery.

Ultimately, Council dislike of the quarians soured the quarian leadership on real integration, and led to certain hardliners taking power with disastrous consequences.

* * *

 **Recent History : the Geth Rebellion, the Refusal, and the Diaspora**

The worst of these was the full-out development of the geth platform system. The geth were designed as manual workers in theory – in fact, many exiles (and some acquired quarian information from ruins within the Veil) indicate the geth were fully designed to be militarized. This is emphasized by the fact that while other military innovations of the geth such as Armatures and hoppers only came after the geth interactions with Nazara, even early geth designs had the Prime, Hunter, and Colossus body types, which cannot be put to any non-military use whatsoever.

Information recovered by Spectre Shepard during her operations after the Benezia Incident indicate that the quarian military may have been responsible for the eventual geth uprising, but few hard details can be determined at this remove. We know the geth were produced in the hundreds of millions, including ships, ground units, and aerospace assets.

We know the geth were fully integrated into the military and had programming to use military weapons.

We know the geth were probably used by the quarian leaders to further stratify quarian society into the rich and poor, and that geth were seen as a threat to the working poor.

What we don't really know, despite quarian protestations of innocence, is what set the geth rebellion off and if it was intentional.

I remember the day we heard about the mess – I had just achieved my first ranking as a priestess and was in the Chapel of the Moon with (back then) Stellarch Thana Vathan, when the transmissions came in.

The 'Rebellion' did not last long. People often castigate the Citadel for doing nothing to help the quarians, but the reality of the situation was much different. The Veil was right next to Aria's territory and things were already going bad there. This was also in the middle of both the Little Rebellions in Turian Space and the aftermath of the Second Krogan Rebellion – the Citadel's fleets were scattered and the people tired of war.

The quarian military initially said they had things under control. They lost that control in a matter of days – in less than a week the geth had taken Rannoch, Haestrom, Tanlnarn, Himetes, and were bombarding the last main colony world of Kresh.

The Council was still debating what to do when the quarian fleet fled from the final battles in Quarian Space, loaded with millions upon millions of refugees. The initial response from the quarian Admiralty was a request to be granted colonization rights to a dextro-compatible world and to figure out how to deal with the geth, and requests for aid and assistance.

The latter was granted (mostly due to Uressa T'Shora), but the request for a world was shot down in a three-nothing vote. The Council stated in hard language that redbox AI experiments and illegal use of things like the geth were clearly an 'internal quarian issue,' since the quarians had ignored Citadel laws on it, and as a result, the Council had their embassy removed. All quarians were rounded up on the Citadel and forced to leave, those without transport loaded into a mass bulk hauler cynically gifted to the quarians by the STG.

The quarian people drifted aimlessly in their fleet near the edges of the Veil for months, until their main warships were either destroyed or simply outclassed by geth. Council observers encountered geth ships three times, and all three times the geth transmitted simple messages.

"Geth do not wish conflict with organics. Do not enter the Perseus Veil and geth will remain within it."

The Council made avoidance of the Veil a law, ignored the plight of the quarian people, and cleansed their hands of the entire affair.

* * *

 **Recent History : the Wandering Era**

Left without a home or even a working forward base, the quarians struggled to survive. Over the decades that turned into centuries, the race changed. They relied on their suits for survival, cut off from the symbiotic micro-life on Rannoch that regulated their immune systems, and began scavenging ships and doing point mining, He-3 skimming, and anything else that could help the fleet.

It was a century later they started with traditions such as Pilgrimages and Last Walks, as well as dispossessing all quarians of personal property for communal ownership. By the time the First Contact War blew up, the entirety of the quarian people had shrunk from well over thirty million to just over seventeen, with fertility rates dropping every year.

Almost all of the quarians' efforts were bent towards the refit and restoration of their warfleets, with the stated goal of retaking Rannoch. Conventional military analysis gave them almost no chance to do so without heavy Citadel support, and the casualties expected would have exceeded tens of millions dead.

Quarian admirals eventually split their fleets fully – a Civilian Fleet, to raise children and food with, and to place those unsuited to military conquest. This fleet focused on mining, engineering, repairs, and doing whatever they could to make ends meet.

The Scout Fleet did long-range scouting and relay mapping missions – mostly for the Council, sometimes for private corporations. They would do mineral surveys, scout pirate locations, or perform high-risk package deliveries, for a price.

All of this was sunk into the rebuilding of the Heavy Fleet, which was where the smartest and most capable quarians were moved to once they completed a Pilgrimage. As their numbers dwindled, fewer and fewer quarians left the Fleet at all. Indeed, if not for a few souls such as Uressa T'Shora, they would have been in even more dire straits.

And if not for their actions at the end of the Benezia Incident, it is very likely the quarians would have slowly and quietly gone extinct at some point. Instead, they won the admiration of many sapients by fighting their rebellious creations and saving the Citadel (alongside humanity, of course).

* * *

 **Recent History : Since the Battle of the Citadel**

Quarians are now firmly established again on the Citadel, most of them inhabiting the highly damaged Zakera Ward and assisting in rebuilding. They have one colony planet, Zarroch, which is currently home to almost forty percent of the fleet quarians, and the majority of the most worn-out ships of the Civilian Fleet have been recycled or turned into shelters for these quarians.

The quarian economy is still a jumbled mess, but volus investors are very keen to work with the quarians, and they are one of the few races invited to do business in Human Space. (As an aside, the quarians are exquisitely careful not to offend humanity, and even racist provocateurs such as the Eldfells of Earth have commented favorably on their work ethic.)

The quarian people as a whole appear to be, even years later, in a minor state of shock. Most have given up on the ideal of retaking Rannoch from the geth, as the fighting against the geth has left the turian, quarian, and human fleets in relative tatters with nothing to show but three planets the fleets were forced to glass.

Haestrom was cleared of geth, but geth mining activity ruined much of the ecology, and the strange issues with the sun killed off all remaining life and made the place basically uninhabitable.

* * *

 **Final Notes**

Quarian history is more defined by what we do not know than what we do know, Jack. It is full of holes that there are no good ways to fill in. Sadly, quarian culture is little more than broken bits of half-remembered things and descriptions of better times in faded trideo replays and old books.

The quarian people are survivalists, but not by nature – merely by elimination. The weak have all perished, as have the kindly and the foolish and the trusting, leaving only those who endure at all costs. This is both good and bad in many ways, as the Admiralty simply cannot, in my opinion, be trusted. They are as compromised as your High Lords by the very same mandate: extinction is not an option.

Living beings with their back against the wall will do anything to survive, and that – combined with their history – makes them something of a threat. Keep this in mind when you examine Dr. Minsta's suggestion of utilizing the quarians. They may make good allies… but they are always going to be suspicious and pragmatic towards outsiders.


	12. Chapter 12 : Quarian Physiology

**A/N:** _Yay, Brooks!_

 _Still working on TWCD. Personal issues are slowing things down, so I thought I'd put this out._

* * *

 **The Cerberus Files : Outcast Races**

* * *

 **Message Header: HELNET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **NEGOTIATING ARBITRAGE HEADERS…CLEAR**

 **SYSFILL 845277-SUB-ELEVEN:** _Cross check complete_

 **DOLOS-FOUR-TWO-ZERO :: BROOKS-420**

 **CREATING HANDSHAKE…ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

 **BEGIN TRANSMISSION: BROOKS**

* * *

Heya, bossman!

So, like, that shit you pulled on the Old Lady and Big Metal Unit? Awesome. Just wanted to put that out there.

I'm glad we didn't get caught up in the shit, although I don't know what made you just kick it off without warning anybody. AIS was all over us on the way out of Eden Prime, but we got out clean except for killing one of the AIS teams.

I keep wishing you could have gotten video of their faces when you blew up HQ. I kind of miss Colonel Brarak, he was so much fun to mess with.

But hey… omelets and eggs and all that. Petrovsky said hook up with Trellani on Caleston, and here we are! Yay for flawless escapes.

So, Trellani wants us to write up stuff about the quarians. Specifically, how they do the nasty, why their legs are so weird, and is there any way we can get our eyes to glow like theirs. Normally, I guess someone like Minsta would do this, you know, with a blood-spattered lab coat and scalpels and shit.

Not really my speed. I mean, I don't mind murdering aliens… or humans. But going after quarians is kinda like drowning puppies. They lost their planet, they ride around in rickety ships, they're trapped in suits, and _they can't eat bacon._

That's hell, right there.

We got your message about low profile, not killing aliens and trying not to piss-off the STG or Deathwatch. Rasa doesn't like it.

I'd rather not kill them – aliens – if I don't have to. But, boss, you realize the other guys aren't operating under the same parameters, right? We won't go out of our way to do things to aliens, we never did really, that was Shadow and Iron Cells. But if they come at us, they're going to die.

As far as quarians go, though, easy peasy. Caleston is full of down and out quarian exiles that _no one_ gives two shits about, so Rasa and I just had to wait a bit until one got in over her head and ate a bullet. Didn't take long for us to find a couple of dead male quarians, either.

See? We're being all kinder and gentler instead of murderfucking the aliens we've been poisoning, dissecting, gassing, incinerating, terrorizing, shooting, and blowing up for the past couple of decades.

Not sure why we're bothering… I mean, it's not like we're gonna advertise it.

Are we? If we do, I want dibs on the drell ad campaign.

Meh. Anyway, we got the stiffs and cut 'em up. Turns out quarians are… kinda freaky. We had to send some of this stuff to Minsta to make sense of it, but for the most part I think we got it all down. Rasa says I need to be professional about this, pfft.

I promise I won't send any porn with this one!

 _{Addendum: Minsta: Lying bitch, she sent me three terabytes of disgusting Fornax quarian pornography… which raises either interesting or horrific questions about just what in the hell Fornax is doing with these clearly unfortunate female quarians._

 _Also, I do not believe for a moment there is actually a quarian vessel called the '_ Boom-Boom _.'}_

* * *

 **Quarian Basic Physiology**

As it turns out, quarians are like the freaky-deaky fifth cousins twice removed of turians. Minsta says the DNA bases for both races is remarkably similar, but it looks like the turians were very heavily modified from a baseline creature that quarians later descended from. Quarians and turians aren't as close as humans and asari are, but they're a lot closer to each other than anything else.

Explains Fleet and Flotilla. Well, that and the dextro thing. I guess it's got to suck if you get poisoned from a blow job.

Sooo… quarians. They're mostly cuties. Two arms, two legs, a head, duh. Warbly voices, glowing eyes, smack-dat-ass hips on the girls and nice, strong broad shoulders on the boys. Shame about the ugly-ass suits.

The basics are pretty much the same for quarians as turians – quarians are hollow-boned, weird backwards legs, etc. They stand a lot shorter than turians, most topping out at around one point six-five meters, although a few (like Admiral Rael'Zorah) are huge, well over one point nine-eight meters tall. They're built more lightly than turians, lighter musculature, and they don't have the full-body plating turians do. They do have some bony plates on the forehead, down the middle of the back, and over both elbows and knees.

Quarian skin is like leather, tougher and thicker than human skin. Unlike turians, they're warm-blooded. They have smaller claws than turians do, only about two and a half centimeters long, but the same kind of fang-teeth and strong jaw. They don't have mandibles.

Those teeth are scary, though.

Quarian faces are freaky looking, but more humanoid than most other races. I'm guessing this is what turians would look like if they didn't have fucking spider fangs and bony plates all over.

Their eyes are ovoid and don't have a visible pupil, the glow is from some kind of luminescent stuff in their eyes that contributes to night vision. The nose is sort of human, at least the top part, but instead of nostrils it just slopes back down to the face at the bottom with lines trailing off from it that have multiple breathing holes.

The lips are a lot thinner than a human and are hard, flexible cartilage stuff. (Minsta would probably have a technical term for this, but who cares?) They don't have ears, instead there are tympanum buried under the skin that serve. Their 'hair' is more like keratin dreadlocks, growing from the space behind the crown of bone plating on the forehead and trailing back.

I am never, _ever_ complaining about split ends ever again.

The quarian blood system is almost identical to turians, using cobalt or some shit so they bleed blue. Their lungs are saclike things (four of them) linked to a tube that helps filter out contaminants, and their heart is four-chambered. (Only humans and quarians have four-chambered hearts for some reason. Odd.)

Quarian bones are, like turians, filled with erectile tissue, which gives a new meaning to the word 'boner,' I guess. Minsta says this means broken bones cause heavy internal bleeding and can be a serious threat, but that it takes a lot of force to break one.

All the quarian digestive organs are in one big sac thing, and quarians are (not surprising given the fucking fangs!) mostly carnivores by nature. They can digest plant matter, but most of the space on their liveships is given over to the production of rapid breeding food animals. Quarian muscle requires a lot of protein for some reason. (Minsta says their catabolism process is consumptive, whatever that means.)

Quarians are really flimsy feeling, outside of those suits. Even the men. Maybe it's the hollow bones, but I just don't get the feeling they can take a lot of damage very well.

The suits themselves are… gross and fucked up. They smell. And God, the shit inside them. The female's suit had some kind of… I dunno, vibrator-dildo thing connected to a VI in it. Their skin has all these cybernetic interface points for the suits, puckered skin and bare steel is so not a turn-on. And all the suits had little recyclers for waste, and this foamy stuff with a water rinse to keep clean inside.

Gagh. Like I said, didn't smell very nice at all.

I'm probably skipping over details, but Minsta will chip in with the good stuff. Or boring stuff.

 _{Addendum: Minsta: Ugh. Can we, going forward, hire less crazy people in our endeavors?_

 _For the most part, Ms. Brooks covers the high points. Quarians are semi-endothermic marsupial-mammal analogues, but with certain lizard and birdlike features. Alien life does not, I have found, fit into Terran categories very well._

 _The bones have similar but slightly less robust structure than the turian analogue, and the skeletal layout is almost identical to the turian, except the changes to the female's hips, which are much wider given how they reproduce._

 _Their skeletal structure as a whole would appear to have evolved from some kind of opportunistic carrion-hunting carnivore, with the legs set up for speed-burst running much like turians, although without the leaping._

 _Quarian muscle strands are thinner and less powerful than the turian groups, although they are also much more energy efficient. The drawback is that they undergo high levels of protein catabolic breakdown as they repair themselves, requiring a high protein diet to offset this._

 _Like turians, quarians do not have much in the way of fat deposits. The female's breasts are actually a thin layer of flesh and muscle over a curved ribcage. More on this in the reproductive segment._

 _Quarians are, similar to turians, dextro chiral lifeforms, with all the drawbacks and benefits that brings.}_

* * *

 **Quarian Senses**

So, we kind of did some guessing on this, although Rasa did talk to a few quarians here on Caleston. (This is a shitty place to live, by the way.) For the most part, though, in terms of senses, quarians are knockoff turians.

Their sight is pretty damned good, and their night vision is excellent, they can see in almost total darkness as well as you and I can in bright light. Something about their eyes also means flashbangs and the like don't work very well.

They can see some UV reflections and faint UV illumination, but not as good as drell or salarians can. On the other hand, their close-in vision is really, really good – they can see much smaller stuff with the naked eye than we can.

From what I get, their sense of smell was scary good back in the days before the suits – Trellani said they had artwork based on scent alone. Stuck in suits all the time, I'm hoping it has atrophied. Ugh.

Taste and hearing are about equal to humans, we think, although they like super-hot and spicy stuff and think sour stuff like pickles are vomitous.

Quarians have some kind of magnetic sense that lets them figure out direction pretty well on a planet, although it's useless in space.

 _{Addendum: Minsta: Dreadfully sparse on details, but functionally correct. The quarian eye is host to a bioluminescent… symbiotic… thing. It isn't exactly fungus, and it isn't exactly a bacterium. It's very strange, we'll need to allocate some time to this if we want to understand it better. The upside of it is that it appears to be very light sensitive and somehow hooked into the retinal analogue of the eye, which is connected with very thick nerves to dedicated lobes in the brain._

 _Some simple tests would indicate quarian night vision is extremely good; they are almost completely immune to most light-based stun effects. The eye itself is covered by a clear nictitating membrane to keep out dust, most likely an evolution from Rannoch, which according to old records had extreme dust storms in the summer months._

 _The rest of the sensory package is hard to determine without more… robust testing.}_

* * *

 **Quarian Immune System**

I tried reading what Minsta wrote and gave up, so I'll just paste it in.

 _{Addendum: Minsta: The quarian immune system is markedly different than the turian one, and I suspect it is possible the quarians themselves were… modified by something at some point._

 _In effect, they've evolved in a sort of symbiosis with several viral strains on their world that inhibit a system of glands in the body. The quarians call them haja, or 'healing points,' and they have semi-mystical connotations._

 _In short, these viruses attack and mark any foreign substances in the quarian bloodstream, which triggers the immune response of the quarian. Their immune substructures are a lot more robust than ours, including NK T-cell analogues that can break apart any known form of protein coats, polyclonal B-cell analogues that produce tailored antibodies that can change which antibody they produce on the fly to fit even rapidly mutating bacteria, and a subcellular 'wall' around each cell nucleus that resists most forms of RNA injection by viruses._

 _Put together, quarians should basically be immune to disease, and they mostly are. The problem is that the quarians have mostly lost their ability to identify individual viruses, and tend to go into hyper-response when the body detects any foreign contaminants._

 _This is almost as strong as some forms of human lupus, resulting in swollen joints, internal bleeding, clotting, and even organ shutdown, as the immune system targets the quarian's tissues alongside everything foreign._

 _With repeated exposure to contaminants, the immune system calms down. Unfortunately, many quarians may not even survive the first major suit breach and injury. Some quarians can tolerate infection and the like much better; others die within hours of a suit breach._

 _I would need a larger number of corpses and live subjects and several weeks in study to determine what factors affect this. I understand this is unlikely to be feasible in the short-term, and that the return on such an investment is… not optimal.}_

* * *

 **Quarian Sexual Organs and Reproduction**

So, quarian sexytimes!

Quarian men are, amusingly, better hung than turians. Like turians, the dong retracts into the body when not in use, and their testicles are stuck inside the body. Quarian males don't have nipples either. (Actually, no males do except humans. Weird.)

But the quarian sex cycle is… freakay to the extreme. Quarian ladies have a birth canal a little like our own, but… different. They have these egg chambers in their bodies, and they have two chambers in their, well, vagina. The quarian males have to bang them hard enough to push through to the second chamber to impregnate the egg in question. If they leave it in the first chamber, nothing happens – so they can choose when and when not to get pregnant.

Except that the female only gets off on the sex if the second chamber is penetrated, so most of them go to town on the males. If the pr0n is accurate, quarian sex is really rough. This also puts the stuff I found in the female's suit in a new light.

From the literature and rumors there's some kind of bonding process or bite or some crazy shit mated quarians do before they shack up for good, and this releases hormones that help relax the inner chambers and allow eggs to get sperminated.

Egg gets fertilized, and forms a semi-firm shell and the woman ejects it after five to six days. The egg is then placed in a pouch on the stomach, kind of like a kangaroo. But the pouch is just to hold and keep it warm until it hatches.

Once hatched, they suckle from the female's breasts like a mammal does. Quarian titties are pretty thin, and instead of milk it's a weird fluid that comes out, straight from the digestive sac. (Minsta, for some reason, found this fucking fascinating.)

From what we gathered, a quarian female's egg stays in place unfertilized until it gets fertilized, and they don't have a lot of eggs – a young quarian probably starts out with about twenty, and that's it. That being said, the big hips and the fact they don't have to bear live young means a quarian mom can actually put out fifteen or twenty kids with no physical problems, six to eight weeks apart. Course, she's only got two nipples, so most kids are raised in pairs a few weeks apart.

Both quarian men and women start having sexual performance issues in their late eighties. The guy can't get it up any more and the female's second chamber starts shrinking and she doesn't enjoy sex as much, or at all. Depressing.

 _{Addendum: Minsta: An almost Pel-level lack of detail and attention to crude innuendo here. However, most of the high points have been covered._

 _Quarian reproductive systems, I have sadly discovered, are compatible with humans, batarians, and even krogan as well as turians. Generally speaking, however, most humans and turians are not equipped with the necessary sexual organ length to achieve penetration of the second chamber._

 _Amusingly, those who do have such… benefits… are seen as superior lovers by quarian females._

 _Quarian males are prized by some asari who find them just alien enough to be exotic, as opposed to the turian or salarian._

 _Given the general tawdriness of modern society, it should come as no surprise that the overall shape of quarian females is pleasing to the human (or asari) eye. The juxtaposition of the hips to waist ratio is also apparently very attractive to turians._

 _Assuming we needed to produce infiltrator cybernetic units for quarians, they are more feasible to construct than turian or salarians.}_

* * *

 **Quarian Strengths and Weaknesses**

Quarians are, unlike most of the aliens we deal with, not superhuman. They're a bit physically weaker than us on average, about as fast, and a lot less tough. They have better vision than we do, especially in low light, but that doesn't account for much, except being immune to flashbangs.

Their immune system and dextro chemistry means they're screwed if they have a suit breach.

The biggest advantage they have (aside from being kickass engineers and top-notch weapons techs) is that they can get by on pretty low rations and water, as long as they get protein supplements. While their bodies freak out at most foreign substances, they are pretty resistant to almost all known poisons.

The biggest weakness is not, amusingly, their immune reactions. Quarians handle direct explosive or concussive blasts that break bones very poorly. Even more so than turians. They also don't have the nifty turian internal blood-vessel door-thingies and bleed to death very easily.

The immune reactions don't help, though. The suits make the logistics of just living – air, food, water, waste disposal – a big chore instead of simple, which means they are probably shit for extended long-term battles. Then again, you don't have many of those on starships.

* * *

 **Quarian Lifespan**

Quarians live about a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty years, but most die around one hundred. Females live longer than males by an average of ten years.

Quarians are considered kids from birth to about fifteen. At fifteen, females begin producing eggs, and the boys develop sexually, and they're considered 'young adults.' They're not fully adult until they do the Pilgrimage in social terms, but in biological ones, they reach full maturity at about age twenty.

Quarian physical health doesn't start going downhill until their late eighties, alongside sexual ability. Sight, hearing, and all that go to pot pretty quick.

* * *

 **Quarian Diseases**

This is kind of a hard one.

Most 'native' quarian diseases have been, well, lost due to all the sterile spaces and shit like that. They have a couple of stomach or digestive disorders, but that's about it.

Exposure to mild contaminants triggers their immune response, which sends them into a mess. The most common side-effects are clogged and runny noses, teary eyes, muscle spasms, vomiting, diarrhea, and fainting. With more exposure over time (like with exiles or the quarian girls at Fornax) it seems to get better, or at least less overwhelming.

That being said? One rumor we picked up says some turian disease can affect quarians if they get exposed, and when that happens, the quarian usually dies.

* * *

 **Quarian Modifications**

Quarians use a lot of cybernetics, but don't like it. Their suits and sanitation systems require cybernetic interfaces – puckered butt-ugly access plugs on their arms, spine, and stomach. And the skin itself is inlaid with some cybernetic stuff too, which Minsta is still examining.

But for the most part, quarians don't like full-out cybernetic replacement, aside from the Techmarines. If at all possible, quarians go for biological replacements. Exiles, being less picky and more likely to be broke, are the only quarians you usually see with heavy augmentation.

A few wealthy quarian exiles (criminals, mostly) have gone full-conversion, to eliminate that pesky immune system problem.

That's about it, boss. Not exactly exciting, but hey… Trellani said she slept with a few quarians back in the days before the suits, we can always ask her for stories!

Minsta will finish this up. I've appended the lab results. Rasa will be doing the psychology section while Trelly researches culture and stuff. I'm off to do some sneaky-sneaky on the extranet and find out about the quarian government!

 _[ATCH-4903: 3.3tb file]_


	13. Chapter 13 : Quarian Psychology

**A/N:** _TWCD is still under construction, be patient._

* * *

 **The Cerberus Files : Outcast Races**

* * *

 **Message Header: HELNET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **NEGOTIATING ARBITRAGE HEADERS…CLEAR**

 **SYSFILL 8851241-SUB-TWO:** _Cross check complete_

 **SUCCUBUS-THREE-THREE :: RASA-33**

 **CREATING HANDSHAKE…ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

 **BEGIN TRANSMISSION: RASA**

* * *

I apologize for the delays in the delivery of this report. As one can imagine, recent events have somewhat disrupted the expected flow of our little project.

The quarians being given a Council seat was hardly expected. Given the new access to the quarian people presented by this, however, I decided to perform a more in-depth study of their way of viewing the universe rather than rely on the limited information we had prior to that event.

Ah, quarians. What a story they are.

As a rule, I find stories more interesting than the rote, dry memorization of 'facts.' A story is a retelling of truth as it is seen by the teller. One can learn not only from the story itself, but the person telling it, what they say or do not say. How they act and react. A story is a wonderful method for discerning reality.

Facts, on the other hand, can be amusingly biased. Supposedly unarguable truths, which does not lend itself to contemplation or assessment, merely acceptance.

What we often conflate as _reality_ is all too often seen through the fogged perception of bias, the ignorant tints of our own personal issues, or the simple reality that learning and comprehension are two very different things.

In other words, it is just another story, but one everyone accepts without question. The concept of 'knowing' and 'common sense' falls into this trap.

We 'know' the salarian is amoral and cold, even though an entire subculture, the Lythari, reject these utterly. We 'know' the turian is obsessed with honor and valor, yet ignore the tens of thousands of outcasts who reject such things completely. We 'know' the asari are promiscuous, the batarian a brute, and so on and so forth.

The strike that succeeds is always the one you never see coming. And if we persist in holding to 'facts' that are no such thing, we are blind. Blinding yourself to reality because of preconceived notions that fit one's worldview is not a luxury that can be afforded to those in our position.

I do not care what a species is 'known' to do, or how they 'always act.'

I need to know how they think to reach that point, what triggers their reactions, what drives their lives and struggles. How they see their story, and how they react to the stories of others.

That is the path to grasping the alien. In this I agree with Matriarch Trellani's assertion that Minsta and all like him are simply too closeminded and compromised by their views to deal with clarity. While I won't claim to match his intellect or technical knowledge, his grasp of the reality of what we deal with is skewed.

I hope to avoid such mistakes in my own assessment of the quarian mind.

 **Cerberus Thought of the Day:** _If one must sacrifice either preparation or understanding, you must also be prepared to fail if things develop unexpectedly. But if one must sacrifice both, you must be prepared to simply fail._

* * *

 **Quarian Psychological Basics**

While I am hardly unfamiliar with psychology, my focus and knowledge has never been in clinical applications, so I was forced to do a bit of reading on psychological models and the like to understand Minsta's fondness for Maslow and the good doctor's methods of breaking down alien minds.

A small diversion from the topic at hand is called for. I apologize, but to simply dive in ignores the limits of Minsta's methods.

Maslow was a pre-Iron psychological researcher whose work fell out of favor in the years prior to the Days of Iron. With the massive destruction of data and electronic networks in the Dark Years, much of the research and study performed from 2020 onwards was simply lost, due to not having paper copies or durable storage that actually survived.

Amusingly, this meant that once humanity got back on its feet, scientists had to rework a great deal of research – and in particular, psychology was redone entirely. Maslow's work was influential on a great many post-Iron survivors, given its focus on basic needs superseding human decency and the like. Transpersonal psychology was more valued than garbage like individualism.

While it may seem strange that our intellectuals discard 'scientific' knowledge because it does not fit our current beliefs, it is less strange when one considers the motives of the High Lords. To them, anything that oppresses the human spirit to their will is good, and anything that defies that is to be suppressed. Being that we pick our scientist, doctors, and other intellectuals based on intelligence, it is hardly surprising that methods or systems that fall afoul of the High Lords' ire are discarded or ignored.

I digress to say this: as a model for understanding _humans_ , Maslow's work was hardly perfected, but it appealed to the grim, battered survivors of a time where humans nearly destroyed themselves. It appealed to the High Lords because it enabled the idea that humans had gone astray due to how their brains worked. And one could certainly argue, even if it was not perfect, it allowed _prediction_ and _understanding_ of human behavior.

Well, better than Freud. I often wonder what that man would think of Brooks and me.

As I said, I won't argue the effectiveness of the method on humans. The same cannot be said for our study targets, the alien other. Applying the Maslow Pyramid to aliens _might_ , as Trellani posits, give a gleam of the familiar to the alien, but I believe it only muddies the waters.

The uselessness of the concept is well demonstrated in other workups, but my resistance to utilizing it is not only due to the inflexibility of the pyramid, but also to the condition of the quarian gestalt psyche.

By that, I mean the pyramid _misses_ the truth of the quarian mind. _This is not a mentally stable population._

Rather than belabor the point, I will try to use it, then expand upon the issues that arise from doing so.

Maslow, I suppose, would put the quarian in an inverted style. They conflate on the SAME level the basic needs of food and shelter with group belonging, then safety, then self-actualization, and finally, ultimately, esteem.

Quarians, like almost all beings, preface survival needs as their most basic instincts. It is very curious, however, that the concept of 'safety' is beholden to the ideal of belonging, of community. The quarian mind is, by nature, nervous, paranoid, and self-critical. Quarians do not even have a word that translates well to optimism, the closest best-fit I could find was 'an ideal of constant good luck.'

The quarian sees 'safety' as something that can only be achieved in tandem with others. Unlike humans, who will betray one another if they are assured of safety, quarians will not do so. This is the source of the always spoken of quarian 'closed ranks.'

The quarian does not see other quarians as 'the other' – only aliens fit into that category. While quarians have had instances of racism, religious wars, and even class differences that led to warfare and death on a nearly turian scale, quarians share with batarians this curious ideal that they are above others.

I must tie this back to the pyramid.

Maslow's methods always tied the concept of satisfying basic needs to enable one to focus on other aspects of life – when one was fed and safe, they could expend energy on love. When they were surrounded by success, they would embark on a search for meaning. I would agree with Minsta's argument that Maslow can be (albeit tortuously) fitted around the mindset of many aliens. They are, despite our distaste for them, still 'people' in most cases, as Mr. Pellham puts it.

Salarians aside.

But I will not say that Minsta is correct in that the pyramid _works._ It relies on the very simple premise that all intelligent beings have a certain hierarchy in their mental views. That one cannot sacrifice the lower needs to achieve the higher ones, only the inverse.

The quarian mind rejects this utterly. I repeat, they equate basic needs – air, water, food – with group belonging.

This may seem madness (and perhaps is), but one must recall what the quarians are defined by.

They are exiles, trapped in suits, on ships in deep space. Is it any surprise that the very needs of life are tied in with the group that provides such? A quarian thrust out from the group has nothing. They have no world they can simply return to, they have no natural allies to help them. They are seen as undesirables by all. Even if that were to magically change they are still bound by their very biology to the group.

The quarian mind will not – _cannot_ – separate 'survival' from 'group,' because they prize safety in a group above almost everything else and their entire concept of survival IS the group.

I do not know if the quarian has always been this way.

I know the quarians are afloat on a badly outdated armada of ships that are constantly in the process of falling apart, kept working only by the awesome intellect and skill of their engineers – and that over the centuries over a _million_ quarians have died from ship failures and life-support collapses.

I know that the shared trauma of losing the homeworld, of being vagabonds for centuries, for barely surviving and having a constant stream of mini-rebellions and revolts have shattered the quarian mentality.

I know the quarians are not like any other race we know of. The krogan have faced genocide. Humanity has faced extermination. The salarians dealt with the Collapse. The turians incinerated half their own race.

But none of us has ever experienced complete _obliteration._

And this is key in the quarian mind.

An asari, a turian, a salarian, a human – they all share a commonality.

They sometimes place the family or the pack above the individual, but they draw a distinction. The turian sublimates himself for the good of everyone, the salarian sublimates his wants for the needs of the family, the asari clings to the concept of unity and strives to achieve that because it is their strength

The quarian cannot envision things like 'self-esteem' and 'actualization of one's dreams' without first having satisfied the needs and wants of the many. More bluntly, even their self-esteem and actualization tends to veer in this direction.

The most powerful turians, asari, salarians, and so forth stand apart from their people. The turian Praetors are often mavericks and go against traditions because they have shown and proven their worth, their merit. The salarian dalatrass can act against the many because she focuses on the eggs, the next generation.

I need not quantify the filth of the Thirty.

But the Admiralty does not do things _for themselves._ There has never been an admiral who embezzled or stole from the quarians. There has never been one trying to build a cult of personality or the like. The admirals are almost inhuman in their sheer _rejection of self-esteem_ and their society sees such as the worst sort of arrogance.

And this is where the pyramid breaks. A quarian cannot define his or her _own_ _success_. They have goals set for them – and that is all. There is only submission, or exile. And exiles rarely if ever band together. They seek out a new way to submit and be part of the greater whole and that is all they want.

Grasp this idea carefully, Mr. Harper. One cannot bribe a quarian. Quarian criminals are without flaw or fail _benevolent idealists_ who had their worldview shattered but would not act against the Fleet or the people. The most vile and darkest of them does not turn his hate towards those who exile him, but instead on aliens, on themselves, on fate or circumstance.

They are bitter at being exiles, yes. Some will profess hate for their own people, yes. But they will never act on such. They cannot.

There is no way to 'divide' the quarians because they see such as not only weakness, but lethal danger. They cannot be guided into spats like asari. They do not engage in meaningless maneuvering out of some ancient instincts like salarian dalatrasses.

They do not make one of their own an outcast until the quarian in question refuses to submit to the good of the many.

Imagine this, Mr. Harper – an entire society where it doesn't matter _how good you are_ , as long as you are loyal and work towards a better life for everyone. It sounds sappy and weak, and then you begin to think and realize it is strength that we cannot match.

There are no quarian _traitors_.

There are no quarian _separatists_.

There are no quarian _terrorists_.

Even the most ancient Citadel records cannot indicate a single incident of serious quarian-on-quarian crime, going back all the way to their discovery. Drunken brawls, petty theft, arguments, a knifing or two in the heat of the moment. But no premeditated murders. No rapes. No serial killers.

They do not bend in that fashion. Be careful in attempting to maneuver them. Be even _more_ careful if you intend to attempt to turn them against themselves.

* * *

 **Quarian Psychology and Age**

Quarians, as pointed out by my lovely Brooks, do not live some outrageous span of years like asari, hanar, or krogan. Nor can it be said they undergo any massive changes in outlook over the years.

Young quarians are often seen as 'hot-headed' and 'brash,' but would put teenagers of any other race to shame, both in their maturity and intellect. Quarians gravitate towards personal responsibility at a very young age.

As they get older, their mindset becomes less and less flexible. Most define themselves by rigid codes of personal behavior and unyielding beliefs based on their early lives. Once they are of age to bear children, they pursue family with a frightening dedication.

Old quarians are often the least stable. If they have not led successful lives, they feel as if they are a useless drain on the needs of the many. Those who age past a time where they can still be productive have a very high rate of suicide.

It is curious that there are no hard, bright lines in the quarian mind as it ages, but that early impressions are the ones that matter. Any attempt at maneuvering the quarian species where we want it must, by the very nature of the quarian, focus on the youngest generation.

* * *

 **Quarian Ships and the Pilgrimage**

I am sure Minsta (or Trellani) would argue the quarians' curious fixation on 'rites of passage' and the Pilgrimage are societal, cultural constructs.

Perhaps. Perhaps.

But stories are not complete without the setting of the stage. In abeyance of this they are merely words and scenes, adrift from understanding, of knowing.

The quarian mind demands the identification of self with the Ship. The Ship is now everything to them; it is their world, their workplace, their only method of survival.

We see ships as tools, as vehicles. They see them as part of the quarian race itself. The Ship is more important than the quarians aboard it. It is the culminated history of every quarian who lived, loved, and died aboard it or in defense of it. The stories of its acquisition, of its refit, of its entire existence.

Psychologically speaking, there are two ships that matter most for a quarian – the ship of their birth, and the ship of their adulthood.

 _All_ quarians (with very few exceptions) are born on one of the three Liveships, massive dreadnought-scale colonization ships used originally to terraform the few colonies quarians established. These ships (among many other functions) hold the bulk of the quarian medical community, and thus this is where quarians are born.

Each of the three ships has a certain cachet. The _Rayya_ , for example, is the Liveship that many of the Heavy Fleet's numerous soldiers come from, while the _Layra_ is where most of the third-class citizens of the Civilian Fleet hail from, leaving the _Crennae_ to produce most of the quarians for the Scout Fleet. A quarian's birth-ship is seen as a subtle but important queue into their future, and it shapes their early thinking and minds.

The _Rayya_ children, for example, are exposed to combat, engineering, and repair duties even as very small children while they grow. On the _Layra_ , on the other hand, they are focused more on manufacturing and working the giant livestock and hydroponics facilities.

All quarians are seen as freeloaders from birth until they provide the Fleet with value. In rare instances – truly gifted pilots, brilliant scientists, things of that nature – such 'value' is inherent. For most quarians, however, they are expected to participate in a rite of passage called the 'Pilgrimage.'

The details are indeed cultural. The effects are psychological.

A quarian who has undergone the Pilgrimage is exposed to the ugliness and hate of the world 'outside' the Fleet. The quarians who come back see 'the other' as hostile, as dangerous, as something to be treated with caution and fear. This is not a rite of passage to adulthood in terms of growing up, it is the clear and traumatic brainwashing of every quarian youth to obey and defer to their superiors, else they be exiled into the hellish galaxy that traumatizes them so.

This is a masterful method of control, Mr. Harper. It not only kills off the truly stupid and reckless (weaknesses that cannot possibly be tolerated in their ragged fleet) and drives the quarian youth back into the arms of their elders mentally, but it reinforces the hostility the galaxy shows them.

It leaves quarians with a bitter taste in their mouths when dealing with aliens, and ensures there are no possible chances of betrayal to outside forces.

* * *

 **Quarian Sexuality and Love**

Surprisingly (given the suits), quarians are a rather lurid and sexualized race, although they are unlike humans, asari, and turians in the level of casual sex they tolerate.

There is _no such thing_ as 'casual sex' in the Fleet.

Quarian sex drives do not even kick off strongly at first. Quarians believe that mates must understand and be friends with one another before intimacy can occur – the concept of 'love at first sight' does not only not translate, but actually horrifies them.

Quarian females tend to take the lead in sexual situations as their hormones are much stronger than males'. Psychologically speaking, quarians see sex as something between permanent partners, and ONLY permanent partners.

Curiously, this doesn't apply to aliens. A quarian youth can dally with as many turians as he or she pleases, as long as they are aware it isn't 'real.' While many young quarians on Pilgrimage do such things (and hundreds a year die from doing so), almost none of them are willing to accept exile to keep such interactions.

Quarian love is not a purely mental/emotional reaction; there are biochemical and hormonal markers and bonds created during the first lovemaking of a bonded couple, similar to the turians. Quarian spouses do not cheat on one another and have no interest in other sexual partners, which sounds very boring.

As far as I can tell, quarians do not have any form of homosexual subcultures, although there are transgenders (who the quarian medical field performs radical sex reassignment surgery on as soon as the issue is identified). Very few quarian females take up with asari mates for any reason, and even quarian males are reluctant to do so for unknown reasons.

* * *

 **Quarian Families**

Quarian family bonds on a mental level are curious. There are families (as in mothers, fathers, children) and then there are _Families_ – groups of very distantly connected relatives in loose groupings.

Ultimately, the quarians operate in tight nuclear families much like humans do (or did). A father, a mother, and between four and as many as ten or twelve children. Family life is a large part of quarian mental stability, although that varies between the male and female.

Males outnumber females, so a quarian bachelor is seen as just unlucky. A female who does not bear children after thirty or so is seen in a distasteful light. It is seen as both a responsibility and a mark of trust and belief in the Admiralty to have large families.

From a psychological point of view, quarians are one of the only races that are actually very firm about how families are supposed to operate. An abusive parent is likely to be exiled; one that does not put the welfare of his children above himself or herself is likely to have their children seized. Physical child abuse is simply not tolerated.

Mental abuse, however, is rampant. Quarian parents often act to determine a child's future, browbeating them into submission to their wishes or demands. A quarian who has a dream of becoming a pilot may be forced into engineering by their parents.

Rebellion against the family's wishes is seen as a sign of immaturity and is usually treated very harshly.

* * *

 **Quarian Morality and Ethics**

Quarians have a very curious moral and ethical code that does not mesh well with that of most other species. Some of this is cultural and tied in with their religious beliefs, but most of it seems to be innate.

Quarians, like humans, divide the concepts of morals and ethics. Quarian morals are how quarians define their interactions with fellow quarians, while ethics are more about interactions with the external universe.

Refreshingly, quarians assign very few acts to some kind of 'evil' scale. They base their moral reactions to something on why it was perpetrated, not the act itself. On the one hand, this leads to some very ruthless behavior. Quarians have and will abandon other quarians to die if it means saving a larger number of quarian lives. On the other hand, it places quarians in a curious position of trying not to act in a way to invite retaliation from others due to crimes.

Quarians are accosted as thieves and untrustworthy because their ethics don't see aliens' rights – to property, to life, to determination – as mattering compared to the plight of the quarian people as a whole. A quarian stealing to feed themselves would be seen as a criminal. A quarian stealing to provide food for his ship or family would be seen as doing his duty.

Quarian language has no real words for certain concepts – rape, for example, simply never happens among the quarian people. This has had the amusing effect of making most quarians feel morally superior to aliens, in particular, when it comes to the fact that most quarians are naturally law-abiding.

I could segue into a dozen different facets of this, Mr. Harper. What stands out to me the most is the blind nature of their self-belief. Almost like the salarian, the quarian mind rarely associates guilt with their own actions, and more along the lines of the reactions of others, be that other quarians or aliens.

It means they do hold themselves to a higher standard, but only by their own standards, not ours.

* * *

 **Quarian Exiles**

It seems every race has those who refuse to conform to the molds set forth by the race in toto. Asari outcasts are antisocial loners who cling insanely to whoever accepts them and hate themselves. Turian separatists are simply unable to sublimate their own needs for the greater good if they have no faith in their leaders. The salarian Lythari are so ethical and focused on the results of actions rather than the intents that they have isolated themselves entirely from the rest of their people and willingly brand themselves so that others will know.

The quarian exile is none of the above, really.

An exile is one who has been formally rejected from the Fleet by the Admiralty. This usually happens on a ship-wide scale, rather than individual actions. A number of times ships or even groups of ships, adversely affected by Admiralty decisions, rejected their orders or sought to act in a fashion clashing with their duties.

In the majority of these cases, the actions were taken because of a belief that they would aid the quarian people as a whole, not out of any selfish or personal beliefs. As I said earlier, there are no quarian separatists or terrorists.

A good example of this was a rebellion almost fifteen years ago by several ships that were doing business with Aria. They seem to have struck a deal by which they would smuggle for Aria and in return, be offered a selection of semi-habitable dextro worlds in the fringes of the Terminus Systems for colonization.

The Admiralty rejected this deal on the basis that it would align the Fleet with Aria and thus surely make the Citadel close their borders entirely to the quarians. Depending on the largess and charity of a person such as Aria struck them as unwise.

The ships who rebelled disagreed, the Captain in charge of the group decided that without a colony world, within a few decades the Fleet would reach a tipping point of decay outrunning repairs. He was discovered and his crews tried by the Admiralty, with most of them exiled.

An exile cannot return to the Fleet for any reason, and are left stranded on the nearest inhabited world. They are given nothing to survive; all they own aside from their suit and a single weapon is taken from them. Many have been dropped on Caleston in SA Space, Vheska in Asari Space, Chelus IX (the setting for Fleet and Flotilla, amusingly) in Turian Space, and at the Quar Prime Station in Volus Space.

An exile suffers a crushing psychological blow that most never recover from, the loss of the Ship, of their identity, of their extended family, of their entire rationale for existing. Given that almost all of them are exiled for what they see as doing the right thing, it is hardly shocking that more than half of all exiles commit suicide within a year.

Those who survive are bitter and hateful. Many blame the Admiralty and hate them, yet end up blaming others as well. Even the most hateful exile won't take any actions against quarians or the Fleet, however. They will be cold and cruel to most non-exile quarians, but that is (usually) the extent.

It is almost sad how they instead attempt to bond with and make a life for themselves in an alien culture. Their mental state is not like that of the asari outcast exactly, but it is close. For an exile to survive, they need a purpose.

A new story to follow. A new reason to drive themselves. Those who find it, use their bitterness to propel themselves, to goad themselves. Most of those who do not find such a thing die.

Of shame, or despair, or of simple self-neglect.

* * *

 **Quarians and Alien Relations in General**

Of all the various races in the galaxy, the quarians have the distinction of being the race that interacts with everyone. This means they have the most familiarity with alien species on average, and they have an excuse to have their people scattered everywhere.

This leads me to wonder if they use their children on Pilgrimage as discreet spies.

No matter.

In general, quarians see themselves as 'better' than all other aliens, an affection they share with the batarian (and the krogan). On the other hand, their naturally self-effacing nature and nervous paranoia make them _seem_ submissive, harmless, and agreeable.

They are cold-blooded in the extreme when it comes to the calculus of alien interaction. Their intervention at the Battle of the Citadel destroyed a lot of their fleet and cost tens of thousands of quarian lives, but also led to them rejoining the Council and being granted a colony world, which is a decision they made with alacrity at the time.

In other circumstances, I suspect they would have simply abandoned the Council to its fate.

I must note that there are also wide differences in how the Migrant Fleet is treated and how individual quarians are treated. Some of this varies due to alien ethics or interests, while some of it varies due to ignorance.

The quarians have the best 'relationship' with the **volus** , bar none. The volus see the quarians as both a market with limited buying selection and thus low resistance to marketing, and as a mobile asset in terms of both capability and resources. Volus mining companies are little more than volus advertising, legal groups and survey teams provide legal cover for quarian mining operations, taking a large cut of the profits and raw materials as recompense for keeping the Citadel from interfering.

On a personal level, however, few volus and quarians interact much. The volus respect the hard work of the quarians, but their communal property economy baffles and horrifies the volus. The quarians, in turn, value the dependability of the volus and appreciate their cooperation, but are bitterly aware the small aliens are only in it for the money.

Amusingly, the other race the quarians seem to favor is our own. **Humans** have a need to cheer for the underdog, it seems, and there can be no race more underdog than the quarians. As Minsta mockingly maintains, the fact that quarian females at least somewhat resemble our own women plays a part in human acceptance, as well as quarian behavior.

The Alliance itself has always been both helpful and shockingly compassionate to the quarians, given how they were treated by the Council. The fact that quarian engineering technology has enabled humans to catch up to the rest of the Citadel races in many areas and the fact that quarians and humans don't need the same kind of worlds has also made cooperation possible.

Unlike most aliens, humans see quarians on an individual level as a net positive. Humans appreciate and value hard work, humility, and loyalty, all innate qualities for quarians. The fact that the Admiralty is too busy trying to simply survive to engage in shadow work makes them the only government the Alliance is likely to bother trusting.

 **Asari** have a long and somewhat distant relationship with the quarians, but the two races do not interact much at all anymore. The asari did not like the quarians in the days prior to their flight from Rannoch, and seem smug about their fall from grace. The Thirty does not allow Migrant Fleet activity in any of the core or border systems of the Asari Republic, although Ilium and Magera have contracted quarian mining and engineering services before.

Quarians see asari as understandable, but not sympathetic. They know full well the asari seek to dominate the galaxy, and I suspect the Admiralty keeps their distance so that the asari don't feel the need to make things even harder for the quarian people.

On an individual level, most asari and quarians don't get along very well. Quarians see asari as flighty, sex-obsessed, untrustworthy, and above all else, manipulative (which they hate). Asari see most quarians as naïve, boring, and not worth the time to get out of the suits to meld with.

The relationship between the quarians and **turians** is very complex. The two races are distant relations, much like humans and asari. However, their foci are so far separate from each other that there is no coming together in natural harmony.

The Hierarchy and the Admiralty don't see eye to eye on a great many things. The size of the quarian fleet (no matter that even before the Battle of the Citadel half of it was obsolete garbage) bothers the turian need for the 'biggest fleet.' The ugly reality that quarians and turians rely on the same type of planetary ecosystems means they are seen as competition, and with the exploding turian population, the Hierarchy has no choice but to snap up every colony world it can, which embitters the Admiralty.

Most importantly, the turians see the quarians as refusing to submit to the proper authority. The turian view is that if the quarians had simply obeyed Citadel Law, the geth would never have been created and the quarians would still be happy in their own space instead of wandering. The fact that the quarians refused to own up and take responsibility for the mess only infuriated the turians more.

While the actions they took at the Battle of the Citadel (and their losses) have reduced this friction, it still remains.

On a personal level, well… Fleet and Flotilla is around for a reason. A large number of both turian outcasts and quarian exiles end up together, the psychology of the two rejected aliens melding well. But even beyond that, turians can admire in a person what they can dislike in gestalt. The quarian focus on the group and defending their families impresses turians. On the other hand, quarians are more likely to trust turians than any other race, as they rarely if ever break their word.

The quarians and **salarians** have never, ever gotten along. This has not really improved since the Battle of the Citadel. Their cultures, beliefs, and acts clash on every single level, and even on personal ones. Quarians improvise, innovate, and make reckless experiments. Salarians plod through everything, refuse to do anything without extensive (and amoral) testing, and hate improvising.

Salarians find quarian beliefs on duty and responsibility both trite and stupid, while quarians see the polymorphic nature of salarians as dishonest.

Quarian interactions with the **krogan** are limited to some mining ops in Traverse locations, mostly with krogan hired as bodyguards. While krogan are not very impressed with most quarians, the krogan appreciate that quarians are one of the few species who treat them with very honest respect. Quarians were outraged at the stories of the Genophage and have been very vocal in suggesting such things should be banned by the Council.

While krogan and quarians don't mesh well in personal terms, I've noticed that even the surliest krogan will grudgingly admit quarians have more 'grit' than they look like they should have. Given that the Admiralty tends to hire krogan mercenaries en masse, they're one of the few legal employers krogan have, and the quarians have always treated them respectfully and paid promptly – a plus in any krogan's book.

Quarians are unsure what to feel for the krogan – pity would be rejected and disrespectful. Most quarians simply try to be polite.

Quarians hate the **batarians** , hardly a surprise. The feeling is mostly mutual. Batarians hate weakness and see the quarians as weak. Quarians see batarians as brutal monsters with no redeeming values, which is only magnified by batarian slavers kidnapping young quarians on Pilgrimage. There is no business between the Hegemony and the Admiralty and, given their new position on the Council, this is unlikely to change.

Quarians only have limited interaction with **elcor** , **hanar** , or **drell**. The latter two simply have no need to allow the Flotilla into their space for any reason, while the elcor prefer to do their own mining and quarians are not built to stand up to the heavy g's on most elcor planets.

* * *

 **Quarian Mental Issues and Diseases**

As I mentioned earlier, this is not a stable people.

Quarians have a wide array of mental disorders, ranging from hyper-paranoia and focus disorders, to a shockingly wide array of various mental dysfunctions. Depression, dementia, and obsessive-compulsive disorders are the most common, but more dangerous ones are not unknown.

If my calculations are correct, based on what research we've been able to pull off, as much as a full fifth of the quarian people may be suffering from at least one mental issue. Quarians have sixteen entire ships given over entirely to the housing and treatment of insane quarians.

Quarians also have the unpleasant experience of sometimes experiencing crippling agoraphobia away from the Fleet. While Fleet Marines are specifically disembarked on airless worlds for zero-g training that ameliorates this, it is always a consideration to keep in mind.

* * *

 **A final thought**

I still do not entirely grasp why we produce these write-ups. Perhaps that is by design. Very rarely do we see the why behind your actions and choices. The why behind your heir being a defective abomination, your mate being a sociopathic alien murderess, or your closest friend a man who probably considers if he should just kill you at least once a day.

Given my own crimes and violations, why you retain my services also confuses me.

But I have come to realize that the why in the story rarely, if ever, matters. We do not ask why the hero sacrifices his life to save others, or why the villain cannot turn his power and intellect to something more positive. We are tropes, constructions of cliché and emptyheaded choice made in the blind, idiotic grasping of things like 'love,' 'hate,' or some other ridiculous electrochemical impulse in our brains.

No, the why does not matter.

So in that light, I offer a thought that does not fit any of the neat categories of Minsta's template, but must be considered and with great deliberation: the quarian people defy logic.

Given their clearly corrupted society, crippling divisions overlaying ultimately unyielding unity, and nigh-unto broken mental status, the quarians should not even be an extant force in the galaxy. They should, by all rights, be a spent and pathetic shade, cowering in asteroid fields, picking over the refuse and basically helpless until another proffers them aid.

They have stood up with a strength and power, a dignity, they should no longer possess. After reading through and studying what I have gone over in the past few weeks, that conclusion is inescapable.

Why have they rejected simply withdrawing deep into the Far Traverse, beyond return FTL limits, if they dislike interacting with aliens?

Why have they not simply sought out some dextro world so far off the beaten FTL path that no ship would bother looking, and simply turning their back on everything that has and continues to hurt them?

Why are they clinging to this idea of return to Rannoch so desperately, if they base their morality on why and have no real reason to need revenge?

These are questions I cannot answer. They don't fit the story being told, and more interesting, they make me wonder what it is we are not seeing.

That being said, the quarians are not an easy people to grasp. We have no idea how much context or depth we miss from being on the outside looking in, and there is no way to 'get' on the inside. We can have Trellani pull a dozen quarian minds apart looking for the answers, but we are not even sure if these questions are the right ones to ask.

I give over to Trellani, who has been studying their culture, and I will back up my lovely Brooks as she goes searching for more delicate information. I hope this has been enlightening to you, Mr. Harper. It was a fascinating story to study.


	14. Chapter 14 : Quarian Culture, Structure

**A/N:** _Still working on the next chapter of TWCD, but some other side pieces will come out sooner than the next chapter._

* * *

 **The Cerberus Files : Outcast Races**

* * *

 **Message Header: HELNET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **NEGOTIATING ARBITRAGE HEADERS…CLEAR**

 **SYSFILL 493337-SUB-SIX:** _Cross check complete_

 **HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE :: TRELLANI-699**

 **CREATING HANDSHAKE…ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

 **BEGIN TRANSMISSION: TRELLANI**

Beloved,

I am still on Caleston, due to some to the chaos still found in the spacelanes. I did not think it prudent to travel yet with so many justicars and other asari moving back-and-forth in the edge of the Rim seeking fragments of the Triune Unity. This has caused some other delays and issues – we will have to abandon salvaging any of the accounts from Ilium, I think, as even the incompetent C-SEC FINCIN will have run those down by now.

On the other shore, I've managed to transfer everything from the Bekenstein, Horizon, Vol Prime, and Sevrans and run them through two entire rounds of transactions to muddy the trail. Pitmre Vell is putting together the entire amount in raw eezo, crypto-bearer bonds, and precious metals.

Our take comes to just under _nine and a half billion_ galactic credits. Not bad for a washed-up old asari dabbling in money laundering.

Thus, the delay has been useful. It has also given me some time to both review Rasa's work on the psychology of the quarian and my own review of their culture, such as it is. As usual, Rasa is somewhat disturbing and asks some insightful questions.

What bothers me more, I believe, is her statement that the quarians are mentally unstable. Coming from Rasa – who makes my own peculiarities look like a bad crest day – Rasa's discomfort with their mental state should be the scream of a nexa to alert others.

If even Rasa thinks they are unstable, then this is not only a mentally crippled society, but quite possibly an unstable one. I would start reaching out and building a cadre of quarian exiles through fronts (NGOs, outreach orgs, and assistance centers), to try to get a handle on the quarian people from a more reliable method than we have now.

I will preface this section on culture by quoting a very old asari proverb: "the ocean is both full and empty; it hides more than it reveals and it has depths best left undisturbed." The quarians are much like this I feel. Their culture is curiously obsessed with efficiency and performance and yet it is in and of itself anachronistic, bigoted, and curiously stratified for such a publicly unified people.

Perhaps this is the thing Rasa also perceived. While I have my suspicions of why they are unstable, those are not relevant to a discussion of how the quarian people structure themselves culturally.

 **Cerberus Thought of the Day:** _Perception must be combined with insight, not assumption, in order to produce understanding. And to deal with the alien is to assume._

* * *

 **Quarian Cultural Basics : the Three Colors**

To grasp quarian culture, one must first understand how it has morphed and shifted. This process has been going on for more than three centuries now, and it was not a directed or guided social evolution, but came from natural pressure.

In the days where they had a world, quarian society was highly divided along racial lines and class limits. The elite in those days were the _alakai_ , roughly translated as 'blues' or 'of the sky's hue.' They had a deep bluish coloration to the skin due to a minor mutation that drove many capillary networks near the surface of the dermis. This was no doubt due to the need for cooling in the subtropical environment they evolved in.

In almost every category save for birth rates, the blues were superior to the _quar-nai,_ or the 'silvers.' As a result, the silvers were the commoners. War between silver and blue nations was short and brutal, always resulting in blue victories. After some time, a middle class of blue-silver crossbreeds, the _quar'nka_ or 'seafoams' arose.

Quarian life broke down among these racial lines and this persisted for millennia. Silvers were restricted to the 'lesser' tasks – farming, ranching, mining, logging, resource collection, brute work. Seafoams oversaw them and served as a merchant caste, while blues dominated the arts, sciences, banking, and professional jobs.

As society grew more complex, this system strained badly, with massive civil rights movements and upheavals. By the time the geth had been created, the entire quarian naval forces were entirely and completely made up of either pure blues or seaforms with a majority of blue heritage – silvers were banned entirely from space, only allowed to join the ground forces of the quarian military.

In the aftermath of the fall of their homeworld and colonies, it quickly became apparent that they had an overabundance of technical personnel and not enough jobs to provide for them all – as well as a lack of basic service providers.

To quote the ever entertaining Brooks: "All Chiefs and no Indians."

In modern days, all tasks are taken up by all Fleet Quarians, from the humble and degrading, to the elegant and refined. They claim this is because all quarians are equal now.

Despite this unity, there is still _division_.

Despite this unity, there is still _stratification_.

Despite this unity, _the separatism has never stopped_. Quarians are still ranked in a curious system that combines their ability and capacity to learn with their potential as mates. This is called the 'Three Colors System.'

A quarian is ranked 'silver,' 'seafoam,' or 'blue,' depending on a multitude of factors, mostly related to their ability to handle complex tasks without supervision. Those who achieve a blue ranking are moved into positions of high authority, decision making, and research. Those who achieve a seafoam ranking are given supervisory authority, middle management roles, and technical jobs.

Those who fail to achieve to the standards of the Admiralty to meet the needs of the blues and seafoams are given a silver designation. The fact that these are based on the old slang racial names is akin to turians ranking people by plating colors, humans by skin color, or asari by crest shape, and then using the slang as official ranks.

There is something very wrong with this picture.

As for the ranks themselves, these are almost always permanent measures, all based on the first two years of a quarian's service after the Pilgrimage. While there is a process and method for reassessment, more often than not it is used to demote rather than elevate.

The majority of blues and the top seafoams end up in the Heavy Fleet, while the majority of the seafoams and the best of the silvers and worst of the blues end up in the Scout Fleet. The Civilian Fleet is where everyone else goes.

The Three Colors play a huge role in a quarian's life, as they determine what kind of education they get, their career path, their priority for mating, their influence in assignment of living quarters – everything. How it is determined is mostly up to the Captain of the ship a quarian joins upon completing their Pilgrimage, but all such decisions are reviewed by the admiral of the fleet in question as well.

Socially speaking, most quarians have a tendency to stay within their own color groupings, although there is some mingling. While there is no overt discrimination, a color ranking predisposes quarians to evaluate another's abilities and potential.

The fact that they style this after the racial divides on their homeworld, however, has certain social ramifications. Whether by design or by chance, many quarians remain bound to their ranking along family lines. A son of two silvers is likely to end up a silver himself. A son of two blues is likely to be a blue.

This is amplified by the fact that breeding across color lines is very rare.

* * *

 **Quarian Cultural Basics : the Fifteen Families**

Aside from the Three Colors, one more designation tends to dominate the quarian people, and that is the Fifteen Families.

Life on Rannoch was, as I have mentioned before, highly stratified by both race and class restrictions. While to some degree these have been combined in the current Three Colors ranking, it leaves aside the fact that certain Families were dominant in those times and today.

A Family is a large grouping of distantly related quarians that work together towards a common interest. Strangely enough, these interests are not in the personal benefit of the group, but rather the quarian people as a whole.

Some Families dedicate themselves to concepts or pastimes – excellent craftsmanship, or skilled analysis of information for concepts, dancing, weapons creation, visual arts, or some form of medicine or science for pastimes. These are known collectively as the Lesser Families, and there are many of them, well over a hundred.

But separate from the others are those who give themselves over to ideals – duty, bravery, or defiance. These are the Greater Families, of which there are only about forty.

Families are only loosely organized, usually meeting once a decade to elect the highest-ranking of their membership to represent them. It takes at least twenty related families to form a new Family group, as well as the permission of the Family they are forming from. Lesser Families tend to be far less formal than Greater Families.

The original Fifteen Families, thus, literally represent the ancestral groups of all surviving Fleet Quarians since the exile. As a result, the things they dedicate themselves to have an outsized result on society. All of the Fifteen are Greater Families.

The Fifteen have no formal role or command rights, and yet the multitude of admirals and captains – well over ninety percent – come from the Fifteen. Likewise, the Fifteen have no hard role in society, but the influence and power of a Family depends almost strictly on how many 'steps' it is removed from one of the Fifteen.

The most powerful of the Families, Family Zorah and Family Raan, are believed to be direct descendants of Athorak Zora and Urasi Rhaan, respectively.

* * *

 **Quarian Cultural Basics : the Pilgrimage and the Ship of Adulthood**

As Rasa mentioned in her write-up, all quarians undergo a rite of passage known as the Pilgrimage. This is an event where a young quarian leaves the Flotilla entirely and cannot return without one of two things: something of tangible value to the quarian people, or acquisition of information that would allow the Fleet to obtain a sizable return on investment of some kind. Upon return to the Fleet, the quarian is interviewed by the Admiralty and a board of captains, who assess their skills, talents, and what they returned with.

In all cases, what a quarian brings back to the Fleet, combined with their skills and potential, determines what ships would accept them as crew. The ships that accept them as crew in turn define their likely color ranking and eventual place in quarian society.

That being said, there is very little that most young teenage quarians with no experience of the outside world can actually bring back to the Fleet of large value. Ninety-five percent of such returns are salvage, hints as to possible mining sites, stolen designs or software, and very occasionally a ship, usually in poor shape.

There have been exceptions, of course – the current High Admiral of the Fleet, Rael'Zorah, brought back six new salarian frigates and the location of a habitable world (which sadly turned out to be a disaster), and Admiral Ben'Koris brought back the first commercial mining treaty the quarians had with the volus.

Most Pilgrimages are not so successful. A poor showing but demonstration of advanced skills in high demand – engineering, metallurgical chemistry, FTL physics, high order mathematics, piloting, or medical skills – will ensure a good placement. Simple but effective returns such as medical supplies or databases or advanced technology of some kind will also get a good response.

The most talented quarians with the best returns are snapped up by the Heavy Fleet. Those who are less successful are usually picked up by the Scout Fleet or rarely the Research Fleet. Anyone left over is taken up by any Civilian Fleet captains that are shorthanded.

Ultimately, a quarian that fails to impress any captain is sent back to their Birthship as crew, which is seen as a very large failure. Aside from the command crew of such ships (which is the highest honor a quarian can receive) most of the crew of Liveships is either older quarians unsuited to the rougher life aboard lesser ships or quarians suffering from mental problems that need to decompress. Failed Pilgrimages account for the rest.

* * *

 **Quarian Cultural Basics : Social Association in the Fleet**

The curious method by which the quarians divide themselves endlessly never ceases to confuse me, beloved. I have no clear reason even now for why they do this, or pursue such meaningless stratification without any benefit.

Among my own people, such divisions are done for… _obvious_ reasons, even if they are distasteful. There is a huge difference between a member of the Thirty and a mere clanless, after all.

The quarians, being mostly a homogeneous ethnological group of singular military background, cannot say the same. And thus most of their divisions are equally artificial.

The social stratification seen even atop family, color, and ship is more baffling. Bluntly put, quarians tend to associate only in narrow lines – by watch-section, by department, by specialty. An engineer on a quarian cruiser on the night shift will, without fail, only associate with other engineers, other quarians on night shift, and at most, other quarians on the same ship.

In Admiralty Votes, in which huge numbers of quarians from different ships mingle to determine new admirals, the stiffness and disassociation of these groups is clear, according to exiles I've spoken with. Simple observation on Caleston shows the same – exiles stick together, Pilgrimage brats stick together, quarians on long-term mining jobs stick together.

Likewise, during the _Mingling_ – an event where young, unpaired quarians meet up to find potential mates – exiles tell me the crowds are actually divided up by interests or by specialty.

I'm not sure if this is some related, leftover clan/tribal affectation from an early period, or something else entirely, but the results (and opportunities) are clear. Quarians will have an excellent concept of who should be in any given area of a ship at all times, and outsiders will not only have to define a reason to be in that space, but cannot expect anything but the minimum required interaction, making espionage difficult.

Second, and more importantly, quarians see their own work focus as the totality of their world. They socialize in small groups. They associate only with their own. If part of the group departs they are forgotten.

In short, they are going to be very hard to reach, outside of extranet efforts. They don't mingle.

* * *

 **Quarian Body Language**

As expected for a species that is trapped in concealing bodysuits, quarians have, over the centuries, become increasingly good at reading body language – not only of fellow quarians, but of aliens as well.

For obvious reasons, the accuracy of this talent tends to vary wildly. Used on quarians and turians, it is very precise. Less so for salarians, even less for asari and humans, and it is seemingly almost worthless for both the aliens of strange shapes (hanar, elcor, volus) and of strange body language in and of itself (batarians and krogan).

That being said, quarians are the only race who actively study and research body language, to the point that I strongly suspect their Fleet Marines have some form of private code or communication based off nothing more than minor body position changes.

While quarians can reveal their faces with specially modified faceplates, only exiles (and even then, only hardened ones) tend to do so. Revealing one's features to another is a high display of trust, one rarely extended to anything but family, mates, and their captains.

Quarian body language itself has a tendency towards obfuscation. Many quarians have nervous tics, compulsive movements, or display high states of agitation and nervousness. The interesting thing is that some quarians do this even when they are not nervous or agitated, as a way to throw off perceptions.

Quarians among themselves make a game of interpreting body language at time, in a fashion that reminds me starkly of some unholy combination of the human game 'charades' and the salarian pastime of seek-thought.

The exiles I spoke with said that many captains and the Admiralty installed limbic system corrector cybernetics to remove any involuntary body movements, making them much harder to read. I question – given the quarian's dislike of unnecessary cyberware – why this is being done.

Given their utilitarian bent, I suspect there is more to this than we can fathom at such a remove.

* * *

 **Quarian Cultural Basics : Names**

Quarian names go through a series of changes as they age and evolve.

All quarians are born with an identifier name and their family name. For example, at birth, my exile informant was Jora of the Lesser Family of Curci. Quarian's combine these names with a glottal stop, which is rendered in asaric as a misha and in English as an apostrophe, thus Jora'Curci.

From birth until their return from Pilgrimage, they are considered children. As such, they are given the name of their Liveship and a diminutive linking term – Jora'Curci nia _Rayya_ , means 'Jora Curci, born of _Rayya_.' Once they obtain their first suit, the baby-like 'nia' is turned into the child-like 'nar,' which stays with them until they return from Pilgrimage or are offered a place on a ship out of sheer talent.

For those few who are given a placement for talent (rith'aal, or 'talent-born'), their name evolves to include the honorific of 'jas.' Jora'Curci jas _Yuthia_ , for example, means 'Expert of the Ship _Yuthia_.'

For those who instead triumph at their Pilgrimage, they are awarded the honorific 'vas.' This merely means 'member' or 'crew,' depending on usage.

While admirals get no special titles aside from the word 'hadrusa' (admiral), a ship's captain gets a special honorific of 'jaan,' or 'leader.' In most situations, a captain will merely use the vas honorific; only in special ceremonial circumstances does jaan come into play.

A quarian's full name is slightly more complex, and rarely used. It is their identifier, their father's identifier, their family name, whichever of the Fifteen Families their Family comes from (if in a Family), their current ship or posting, their birthship, and their color.

For example, prior to exile Jora was titled Jora'Ratham'Cursi gil Nihal vas _Yuthia_ nar _Rayya_ li alakai – Jora Cursi, son of Ratham, of Family Descent of Nihal, crew of the _Yuthia_ , born of the _Rayya_ , and of blue color ranking.

A less elevated figure with no clear Family affiliation would be simpler: Nira'Miur'Una vas _Inor_ nar _Sirah_ li quar-nai, or Nira Una, daughter of Miur, crew of the _Inor_ , born of the _Sirah_ , of silver color ranking.

These extremely long names (rivaling that of salarians) are almost never used outside of death rites and exile rites.

Once exiled, a quarian has no connection to the fleet. Most of them style themselves after the planet they are on, such as Jora'Cursi var Caleston. Those who become involved with aliens will often even toss away their family name to take up that of their spouse or lover.

All exiles, however, have a 'formal title' when spoken of by Fleet Quarians, the identifier 'xai,' or 'exiled.' Instead of a ship, their fleet is used – for example, Jora'Cursi var Caleston xai Heavy Fleet.

The interlacing nature of such names strikes me as unnecessarily fussy. Given the jungle environment, rapidly moving populations, and many cants on Sur'Kesh, the long and elaborate names there make a certain sense. The quarian population, on the other hand, evolved this complicated naming scenario only after moving to a fleet lifestyle in the flight from Rannoch.

Given every quarian is tracked in Admiralty databases, such long titles are a strange outlier in the usually terse quarian social system.

* * *

 **Quarian Cultural Basics : Other**

Unlike most other cultures, quarian life is bifurcated sharply along the lines of whatever fleet a quarian serves in.

The Heavy Fleet has the most modern and up-to-date ships, the best trained crews, and the most resources. And yet the crews of the Heavy Fleet are grim, taciturn, and often under intense pressure to outperform. At the other end of the spectrum, many on the Civilian Fleet have only light duties and a great deal of free leisure time.

Dance and song take up a large portion of public recreation activities, as do video games and haptic entertainment. VR rooms are extremely common (and needed, given the cramped conditions of the Fleet) and there is a focus on decorative arts that require little resources – rugs, hangings, painted patterns, and the like are all very common.

If asari culture is built upon on the blending of ideas, on the consensus of culture, on the lack of focus on variance and taking comfort in the identical, then the quarian culture is based on a sense of duty and responsibility, of pride in survival, and of remembering the past with an intensity bordering on mania or obsession.

Quarians are – often to a fault – almost always polite. While there are certainly a few sharp tongued quarians (Jora being one of them, insufferable male) it is rare and they are the exception. Most are polite, humble, and gently self-effacing yet very dependable.

Likewise, for the most part, their personal interactions are along the same lines – quiet, understated, and calm. The greeting of clasped forearms is only for males, females touch each other upon the shoulder.

* * *

 **Quarian Social Structure**

Given the already outrageously Byzantine complexity of quarian culture, the idea that there are even more layers to it somehow fails to surprise me.

While I have not been very successful in learning much about this, there are subtle levels of respect and importance for positions within the Fleet or aboard a ship. Engineers, pilots, and command staff are held at the highest level of respect. Medical personnel, scientists, and info-system workers are slightly below that. Fleet Marines, life-system specialists, operations crew, and support staff are below them.

On the lowest run are the 'nonessentials' – repair techs, dancers, entertainers, janitors, miners, and everyone else in quarian society.

No one is disrespected, per se. While a dancer holds a low social rank, they are very highly respected and admired by all who watch their performances, and sometimes hold a blue color rating as well. But when it comes to allocating VR rooms, mating clean rooms, raw resources, or the size of living quarters, it is done by this structure.

Two groups are outside of this entire mess – Recallers, the ancestral priest-caste of the quarian religion, and the wholly cybernetic Heavy Marines.

The former are all gathered onto a single series of ships, and have very limited needs that are always seen to. That being said, they stand apart from other quarians, and have no interaction with anyone but other priests, except during religious or death ceremonies.

The somewhat disturbing full-conversion borgs that are Heavy Marines, likewise, tend to stay in their own specialty assault vessels. They remove their family name entirely, simply going by their identifier and a special honorific that means 'sacrificed for the Fleet.'

* * *

 **Quarian Religion : the Ancestors**

The quarian religion is, in a word, _contradictory_.

From what I can gather, the quarian religious beliefs are intermixed between the most backwards and illogical superstitious myths interleaved with detailed science and philosophical arguments.

The basics are simple enough: A soul of an intelligent being is an ongoing evolution of the core spirit, or 'ikwiti.' While alive, one's actions and choices – and the reasons for those choices – strengthen or weaken one's spirit. Upon death, the spirit passes from the realm of materials and life to one of fugue or waiting.

The weird part comes in that quarians believe these waiting souls are capable of acting in the material plane and willing to do so. While this sounds at first glance like turian spirit worship, there are two key differences.

First, the quarians do not think the ancestors can act in a physical fashion. They can influence the thinking and actions of quarians who devote themselves to being able to 'hear' such guidance.

The more insane difference is that quarians think with sensitive enough technology, and a good enough understanding of high-energy physics, ancestral beings would and could 'inhabit' a living being and add their spirit's strength to the person being inhabited.

Ultimately, all quarian souls would unite in some kind of gestalt that, once it reached the proper 'soul strength,' would lead the quarian people into an age of utopia.

Given their close relationship with turians, it should come to no surprise to anyone that quarians obsess over the dead just like the turians do, if in a less grisly and more… revolting fashion.

Namely, the remains of all dead quarians are rendered into the feeds and fertilizers that grow quarian food. The quarians believe that 'fragments' of the spirit strength of the dead seep into these and, via eating the plants and animals that feed on them, into the quarian people themselves.

Given limited eco-resources and a closed system, recycling the dead is not novel. Their beliefs in transmigration, however unlikely, are what bother me, in that the sensible, utilitarian, and somewhat resource-strapped quarians expend a great deal of time, effort, resources, and money into building machines to search for and communicate with their ancestors.

Their redbox technology is a large part of this, as particularly important quarians are destructively scanned into the redbox and then 'implanted' into clone bodies to act as a sort of guiding council for the Admiralty. The priesthood thinks a clone so imprinted with the 'mind' of the dead will be more likely to attract the soul.

Their work on this leads me to troubling questions about both the true nature of the geth and exactly why quarian society was so racist.


	15. Chapter 15 : Quarian Culture, Expression

**A/N:** _Working on TWCD when I can, although I'm still rewriting some of it._

* * *

 **The Cerberus Files: Outcast Races**

* * *

 **Message Header: HELNET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **NEGOTIATING ARBITRAGE HEADERS…CLEAR**

 **SYSFILL 845277-SUB-ELEVEN:** _Cross check complete_

 **DOLOS-FOUR-TWO-ZERO :: BROOKS-420**

 **CREATING HANDSHAKE…ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

 **BEGIN TRANSMISSION: BROOKS**

Oh my God, Caleston is so _booooring_.

Anyways. Trellani was about a third of the way done with cultural crap when you pulled her to go do stuff on Vol Prime. Not sure what's going on, Rasa said money stuff, which is bleh, so I just went ahead and worked on this instead.

I have to say, boss, I think Rasa's right. Despite being nervous cuties with seriously badass weapons, there's something off about quarians in general. You don't really notice it at first, because most people just ignore quarians – especially down on their luck outcast ones.

But I watch, and I think a lot of them are fucked in the head. Minsta had us collect a few more dead ones to do some personal research on the eyes, and one of them had died of a drug overdose. When we pulled his suit, his whole body was scarred up.

He'd coded his own suit to cut him. We hacked his VI and found his diary and the guy was a mess. He'd been outcast for five years, and he'd been outcast with nineteen others.

Seventeen of 'em had committed suicide.

Anyway, I got to looking more into quarian culture. I like Trellani and her way to do stuff, but her analysis is so… dry? It doesn't _connect_ you, to the feel of things, or show you how they're shaped. It's like walking through a museum, which is just a bunch of stuff dead people made that others go and look at to feel cultured or something.

Maybe I'm not any better. I mean, all of it is just set pieces and stage props to me. But just because I'm the way I am, doesn't mean everything is like that, does it?

Actually, don't answer that.

ANYWAYS. So I went at this a bit harder than usual. Digging through stuff revealed a pattern to me, I think. Quarians don't have a lot of _defense mechanisms_ against the outside world because the  outside world doesn't bother with them a lot. Now they're part of the Council, that will change, but quarians aren't very good at change.

From what I can get of their culture, they're pretty hung up on themselves first and foremost.

 **Cerberus Message of the Day:** _Secrecy is the fuel of inefficiency, the source of hysteria, and the best weapon to use against truth._

* * *

 **Quarian Culture : Art and Architecture**

Given they live on a bunch of raggedy-ass ships, you'd think there wouldn't be much time for this, and you'd be right. Most quarian physical art is done in cloth or plastic hangings, tapestries, tiled mosaics, and patterns in wiring and repairs. Quarians never did do anything like painting, exactly, and from what we got from their history, the idea of applying art to buildings was seen as wasteful.

Still, quarians are crafty. I mean like crafts crafty, not sneaky crafty. Although they can be that too, sometimes.

But crafty. Quilts and throws and blankets, little designs on cloth to wrap the kids' suits in, mosaics of used up recycled plastic on the floors of living quarters. Things that don't take a lot of time and can be done in phases or piecemeal.

Most quarians in off-hours fiddle with this kind of stuff, to make their ships feel more homey, I guess. Quarians use lots of purple, black, red, white, and gray, and almost no blues, greens, or yellows. Most personal quarters have two or three hangings, some worked on by generations of quarians.

There are larger plastic painted tapestries – one of the exiles we talked with said the Liveships each had a huge one, about thirty meters long, showing the history of the race since it had fled Rannoch. These are collaborative efforts, I guess – you can't just be an artist in the Fleet, that's not useful enough. I mean, there are Lesser Families who specialize in art, but they do other stuff for a living.

When they do repairs on their ships, sometimes they make patterns, artistic designs or whatnot in the wiring and welds. I actually managed to get a pretty good look at one of the quarian Scout Fleet vessels when it was docked on Caleston dropping off kids for Pilgrimage – older turian light-cruiser. At some point it had been blown nearly in half, torpedo I figure.

The quarians had patched it up and the middle of the ship – where the blast had occurred – had been redone in layers of hexagonal armor plates, overlapping in patterns to form the Quarian Naval Flag. If you didn't know what to look for you wouldn't even notice the damage.

As for architecture, quarians are just getting started on that. Most of their buildings are utilitarian boxes with windows and life-support systems built-in, although most of the bigger buildings have at least some stylistic elements to them – mostly diagonal shapes and curves at corners.

It's going to take a while for the quarians to stop being so grim and get back to making art for art's sake. Most of them see it as a hobby you do in your spare time, and the idea of someone who makes a living from art alone baffles them.

* * *

 **Quarian Culture : Music**

Most quarian music is pretty hard to get a hold of. The quarians have their own internal Fleet extranet, and most of their music is on that. Music, like art, is something done in off-hours by whatever quarians are interested in it.

One thing that stands out is quarians don't have any native instruments anymore. None of them were brought up from Rannoch (not surprising, given the evacuation) and what few existed were not replicated because no one knew how.

From old images and art we know quarians had an array of stringed instruments and something like a cross between a bell piano and a harpsichord, and lots of types of drums and percussives. Nowadays, though, all instruments are electronic, synthesized sounds and whatnot.

Quarian music is fucking depressing. What little of it we got from exiles was almost always going on about duty, sacrifice to the Fleet, return to the homeworld, and what Pel would have called 'weak ass crying' about things sucking badly.

Getting a good insight on the quarians through their art and music isn't going to happen, because to them, self-expression is not that important. Almost all the art and music is done by groups, families or bands of friends. Even exiles, who rarely hang out together, will come together to make art and trade gossip.

They see it as background amusement and a tool. Not culture. Which is one more way in which they're just weird as hell, man.

* * *

 **Quarian Culture : Entertainment and Sports**

Most quarian entertainment is video games, VR, online books, haptic shows, and anything else that doesn't require resources or lots of time better spent doing something else.

Quarians make their own video games, shockingly, and most of them are pretty good. It has been one way the Fleet makes money – 'Galaxy of Adventure' is a quarian game and has hundreds of millions of players, and it's like five percent of their total income at this point. Most of their games are action types, or sims – although they make a really funny and cool series of romance games too.

Please, please, _please_ let me send them a bunch of stuff from Japan! Or the salarian stuff in Shin Akiba!

Quarians don't have the time (or equipment, or actors) to do much with making haptic shows or movies, but they do watch the fuck out of Fleet and Flotilla (which uses exiles for actors). Quarians do write books – mostly engineering texts and the like – which they sell, but they mostly read various kinds of fiction.

The quarians used to have sports, but most of them have faded to historical curiosities by now. The quarian historians we contacted only had the names of some of them, and none of them are still played today.

The most common physical games are played by little kids, and are basically disguised introductions into problem solving, repairs, and suit maintenance, which is both depressing and smart.

Quarian VR systems are a lot more in-depth than most other races, and the one concession they made to relaxation over duty seems to be the number of VR rooms present throughout the Fleet, that provide full body, full sensory VR experiences.

We could make a lot of money if we could get some kind of stealth drone to Rannoch to take half-meter level resolution scans of the terrain and make a VR sim of Rannoch.

* * *

 **Quarian Culture : Tourism and Events**

LOL, Minsta's outline is so dorky. Quarian tourism is like batarian flower pressing, asari celibacy, or drell SCUBA diving.

Short answer, no.

Long answer, no repeated a bunch of times.

Quarians, until recently, were only barely tolerated anywhere. Quarians also find the idea of 'vacation' to be insanity, and didn't have a word for it. (As an aside, like turians, there are quarians who literally work themselves to death. Quarians find it sad but honorable, just like turians do. Weird.)

Given that they don't have 'time off' on the Fleet, the idea of casually traveling somewhere to enjoy themselves has not registered with them yet, even those on their one colony. And there is no big rush from other races to try to drum up quarian tourism either.

Quarian ancestor worship doesn't have holy days or days of reflection or any of that shit, so there are no real events of that nature. The only thing that kind of fits is the 'Day of Sorrow,' yearly remembrance of every quarian who died in the past year. Even then, if you didn't have someone directly related to you die, you just keep working.

* * *

 **Quarian Culture : Ritual Dance**

Dance is the only form of art the quarians bother to maintain properly. Dancers are actually a profession for the quarians, and you have to be really, really good to qualify. Most of the dances are not done to music (quarians find the combination strange), but rather to a story being chanted.

Most of the dances done by the quarians are abstract, as the stories behind them are allegorical and somewhat mythical. Most of it is historical and propaganda laced, but still interesting to watch and listen to. The dancers themselves are incredible, leaping and jumping and bending in ways that would make an asari jealous.

A few of these dances have gotten out onto the greater extranet, but the source of most information on it is a pair of exiled dancers from the Fleet that now work with the Fleet and Flotilla production company. We have no way of knowing if these dances are real, but the dancers themselves… **_wow_**.

If I could bend that way I'd be a Fornax star!

* * *

 **Quarian Culture : Promotion**

Being a military organization the Fleet is all about promoting people to the best level at which they can serve. Unlike our own way of doing things, you don't get promoted to be a manager by 'working your way up,' but by _demonstrating_ leadership.

Promotions are a big deal in the culture, and are the only reason quarians throw parties aside from births. A quarian chosen to be captain is an even bigger deal, and being elected to the Admiralty usually becomes a drunken debacle.

Given how straitlaced they are most of the time, these promotion parties are the only times they blow off steam and let themselves act silly. We only have partial stories about these, but one of our exile interviewees told a story of the day Admiral Rael'Zorah became a captain, got drunk, flirted with half the female captains at the party, arm-wrestled an industrial mech (and won!), and ended up arrested for brawling.

So, the cuties _can_ have fun, they just choose not to. That's even worse! _No bacon_ and boring, blech.

* * *

 **Quarian Culture : Language**

Quarians had a lot of nationalities and languages, just like we do. In the flight from Rannoch, everyone was expected to know 'Fleet Saith,' a specialty language designed for military operations. Over three hundred years there's been a lot of drift, and some of the other quarian languages have lots of words imported into Fleet Saith.

We know of four languages the quarians have that are still extant, but the rest have fallen into the dustbin of history as no one alive speaks them.

Most quarian language (both Fleet Saith and the others) uses the same kind of subject-time-verb-object as traditional Chinese, with inflection points for emotions and status. The writing itself is all curved lines and little tick mark looking things. I'm kinda sorta a linguist, but the language is clearly what Trellani would call utilitarian, and what I call boring as shit.

Unlike Galactic Asaric, English, the little clawspeaks, or other alien languages, there's almost no borrow-words from other sources in Fleet Saith. Ideals and concepts that don' t fit the quarian Grim Stoic Lantern-Jawed Mask of Duty simply don't make an impact on their society.

Quarians are weirdly formal in a lot of situations, but very casual and jokey in private conversations with family or close friends. But the language forms make them sound modest or even shy regardless of how they speak, because most translators are done to Galactic Trade Asaric and the translations make them use noun-forms that are submissive in Asaric. Looking at the language itself, that's not always the true case.

* * *

 **Quarian Culture : Greater and Lesser Families**

Trellani already went over the big parts of this, but she was focusing more on their role in society. The Families themselves are more interesting.

Each Family, like she said, is devoted to something, either something you do in your off-time or a concept. The off-time stuff is done by Lesser Families – most of the hangings and mosaics, the dancing and music, all that gets done by the members of those Families.

There are lesser Families that make games, VR sets, and toys for their kids. There're Lesser Families that record and choreograph dances. There're Lesser Families that focus on accounting and finances, or on weapons maintenance, or whatever. The key linking ideal is that they all focus on something that is both useful to the people and relaxing to them.

It's not really hard for a family grouping to join a Lesser Family. It's not an honor role so much as a recognition that you're good at something kinda cool.

The Greater Families, on the other hand, are basically the biggest whackjobs in the Fleet. Obsessed with whatever 'virtue' they focus on, these assholes act like a mix of the Thirty with morals and a salarian dalatrass if you ask me. They treat their own like dirt and halfway look down their nose at anyone else.

Greater Families force all members to go through Pilgrimage, although a few dislike the process and think it's suitable only for the clearly less talented quarians to prove themselves. Regardless, a Greater Family child has to produce something really impressive in their Pilgrimage or they're not allowed to represent the Family.

Greater Families put in asshole-level restrictions on all family members, including deciding who gets to sleep with who, what jobs young Family members can take, and even who they can and can't associate with. Shocking that they have some of the highest rates of suicide and mental instability among quarians.

Most of the concepts the Greater Families uphold are hard to measure. The Koris Family, for example, is focused on Protection, which make sense given a Koris has been the Civilian Fleet Admiral for the past two hundred years straight. They typically take positions to ensure the survival of the civilian elements of quarian society, hated the idea of fighting the geth, and basically tried everything they could to make sure the quarians could survive as a people.

When people think of Protection, they think of someone defending or things like fortresses or whatever, when the quarian way of looking at it is different.

* * *

 **Quarian Culture : Clothing and Suits**

Since they have to live in these smelly things their whole lives except a few hours for sexytimes, it really isn't shocking that quarian suits are the biggest measure of individuality they have.

Quarians have two suits: a 'main suit,' used almost all the time, and a 'Fleet suit,' only used for very important ceremonial events. Fleet suits are all identical – dark black coloration, identical layout of armor panels and joint covers, and very muted or even blank colors and patterns on the reik (the cloth thingy that covers the back of the mask and hides all the tubes and stuff).

Main suits, on the other hand, vary wildly. Most are a thick environmental suit overlaid with some minor armor plating on the legs, and an armor harness and air filtration pack with armored shoulders and chest plates over the upper body. The mask helmet assembly hooks into this and the reik covers the back of the helmet up.

Many quarians wrap lengths of soft cloths around their bodies as well to set off suit colors. Most suits are black, white, or gray. Green suits are only seen on the Liveships for children not yet sent on Pilgrimage.

The reik and cloth wraps are patterned based on Family lineage. While most of the Greater Families have unique colors and patterns, Lesser Families and those quarians who do not have a family grouping use individual patterns and colors.

Quarian faceplates are semi-opaque, usually only revealing the barest features of the quarian wearing it.

* * *

 **Quarian Culture : Mating Rituals and Bonding**

Like the turians, quarians do some freaky shit when it comes to sexytimes.

Quarian girls end up basically going into heat sometime after they hit full puberty and growth, and this only stops when they get mated with their husband. There's biting and some kind of enzymes involved, but only the good quarian porn shows all the details, and it's kind of glossed over.

It's like the stupid storyline stuff they throw into a porn movie at the beginning to explain why they're getting their freak on, which just gets fast-forwarded past anyway.

From what we've been able to figure out (and no, quarians really don't like discussing it), quarians who are mated are linked with pheromones or something and almost always stick together. Even if one gets exiled, the mate is likely to take exile with them rather than stay. Quarians don't ever have sex with another quarian besides their mate after the whole biting-bonding thing.

Which brings me to the best part about quarians.

Quarians who never get bonded to another quarian basically act like turian girls, always ready to fuck. This affects the men a bit later than the girls, but it still happens. Half the fun of Fleet and Flotilla is the main couple trying not to just endlessly get their freak on and acting all embarrassed when it happens (the other half is the romantic stuff and the angst, which I will admit is pretty good for people with bone plates for faces or wearing concealing masks).

Most of the exiles we met were shacked up with turians, although one was banging a human woman, and one very freaky quarian guy was living with THREE asari. Wow.

I'm sure Minsta will hate this part of the report, but our best shot at infiltration of the quarian exile community is definitely in the sack.

* * *

 **Quarian Culture : Death Rites**

Being all military and formal and shit, you'd think quarians would have fancy death rites. Not so much.

Short version, you die, you get prayed over, your body goes into the recycling vats, and you become either mulch or feed for their livestock.

Quarians find the idea of burial bewildering, and cremation completely insane. They can grasp the turian obsession with dead body parts a bit better though, even though they think the body is the least important part of the quarian's soul.

Exiles usually bury their dead, if possible, with a tree sapling or something growing to symbolically use the body of the dead to make more life.


	16. Chapter 16 : Quarian Government

**A/N:** _Still working in bits and pieces on the next chapter of TWCD, but I really want to get the quarian stuff done and out of the way so we can get going with Krogan and Volus._

* * *

 **The Cerberus Files : Outcast Races**

* * *

 **Message Header: HELNET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **NEGOTIATING ARBITRAGE HEADERS…CLEAR**

 **SYSFILL 845277-SUB-ELEVEN:** _Cross check complete_

 **DOLOS-FOUR-TWO-ZERO :: BROOKS-420**

 **CREATING HANDSHAKE…ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

 **BEGIN TRANSMISSION: BROOKS**

Figures I'd get stuck with this.

So, we had to leave Caleston. A pair of STG flunkies (God only knows what the fuck they were doing out here) made Rasa and it turned into a running fight. We got away by blowing up part of the hospital, and skedaddled on the bulk freighter we had as backup.

Er, somehow we may have also gotten C-Sec Remote Force, a couple of Commissars, and the VDF involved.

Rasa remote-detonated the trade ship… which may, you know, have taken out an STG frigate. No biggies, right?

Luckily, all our findings (and quarian corpses and equipment and whatnot) were stored on the bulk freighter. I took a couple of light hits, but Rasa had to take one Commissar out herself. She got hit three times with a Zeus and I've got her in medical suspension.

It's not life-threatening, but it needs more than just medi-gel to fix. I need an evac point ASAP.

* * *

 **Message Header: HELNET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **NEGOTIATING ARBITRAGE HEADERS…CLEAR**

 **SYSFILL 333932-ADD-SIX:** _Cross check complete_

 **HERA-THREE-NINE-NINE-SIX :: NOPE-NICE-TRY-3996**

 **CREATING HANDSHAKE…ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

 **BEGIN TRANSMISSION: ILLUSIVEMAN-1**

Brooks,

Good job on evacuating Rasa and the research until this point.

We've been doing some recruiting and I have a medical shuttle on its way to Coreslton V, three jumps out from your current location per HELNET. They'll be able to stabilize and treat Rasa once they arrive.

I am very concerned the STG was able to identify Rasa at all, given the way she has changed her physical appearance. We may have to give some thoughts on to how best to deploy you both in other regions of the galaxy.

I'm somewhat disappointed you decided to resort to active terrorism as a method of covering your escape, especially if evidence remains that ties the action to Cerberus. We'll speak more on this once you return to Minuteman Station.

I'm not even sure how or why Commissars, C-Sec or the VDF is involved, but I'm sure the conversation will be _fascinating_.

In the meantime, finish the quarian report.

As Kai Leng and Theo Pellham have completed cleanup duties on Terra Nova for the moment, I'll be dispatching them to cover the krogan and see what we can find.

* * *

 **Message Header: HELNET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **NEGOTIATING ARBITRAGE HEADERS…CLEAR**

 **SYSFILL 845277-SUB-ELEVEN:** _Cross check complete_

 **DOLOS-FOUR-TWO-ZERO :: BROOKS-420**

 **CREATING HANDSHAKE…ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

 **BEGIN TRANSMISSION: BROOKS**

Got it, boss.

From the comm-chatter we picked up, the STG didn't make Rasa as Cerberus – they ID'd her from the days when she was a Broker assassin. It was her bad luck to pick a Face that they linked to her real identity.

The rest, well… it just happened?

Oh, and the VDF is _really_ not good to piss-off. Who the hell carries around a ground-based missile saturation launcher?

Anywhooo… oh, right. Quarians. Quarian guvmint! Quarian politics!

Ugh. No. No such thing. This is sooo not going to be really interesting, just so you know. I know people see them as a bunch of gypsy thieves, but they're really organized among themselves. And they don't argue much.

Keep in mind, we only see the fuckups and the kids, not the professionals, in the wider galaxy.

 **Cerberus Thought of the Day:** _Indecisive action and caution is better than decisive action without information. Once overextended, you cannot expect to find safety._

* * *

 **Government : Overview**

I don't know what the old quarian government was like on Rannoch, but from the bits and pieces Trellani put together from the history, and the little we got from exiles, the idea of civilians being in charge of anything is _not approved_.

Some of this is probably leftover from whatever made the whole mess of the geth to begin with, but common sense says when you're running from killer robots in a galaxy that hates you, democracy is not the way to go.

That isn't to say there isn't democracy in their government, only that it isn't the bedrock. Everyone is huge on personal responsibilities, so there's not a lot of politicking that we'd recognize as such.

Quarians run themselves like a military organization. I don't know why that's a shock, given how similar they are in a lot of ways to turians. I mean, freaky legs, weird fangs, sex-obsessed girls, duty fixations, big fleet fixation…

It shouldn't be a shock. But it is. I guess I'm not better than anyone else when it comes to assuming they'd have some less… militant organizational thingy.

God knows Rasa's pounded it into my head that stereotypes get you dead quick, but sometimes they exist for a reason.

The government is split between the Admiralty, the Fleet Commands, and the Logistics Commands. Unlike our own military, there is a level of disconnection between command-level authority and strategic-level authority.

Generally speaking, the point of quarian government isn't like most other races. It has three tasks – coordinating fleet activity, distribution of resources and logistics, and determining the overall goals of the Fleet for the year.

Quarians have funny ideas about politics. Given they run the thing like a military organization, that's not a surprise, but the way they look at it is weird. Most of them tend to try to make every political decision into some kind of problem – an engineering excessive, or a programming application – and 'solve' it using logic.

They certainly don't have political parties, so to speak, although quarian opinion falls into one of three rough groupings. The first (and biggest) group is simply content to follow the Admiralty and its orders. The second group is focused on giving battle to the geth and reclaiming Rannoch, while staying far away from aliens. The smallest group (but the one growing the most rapidly in recent months) is instead focused on building up a new quarian nation on colony worlds and ignoring the geth menace for now.

* * *

 **Government : the Admiralty**

The highest authority in the quarian government is obviously the admirals. There are five admirals at any given time – never more, never less. This is formally called the Admiralty Board, and each admiral has to have been a captain for at least ten years, have the approval of ten other captains from the Fleet, have produced a kid (or a dozen), and undergone a series of strict mental and psychological tests to weed out crazies.

In the abstract, the admirals are the ones giving out high-level guidance and making policy. Everyone else just executes.

Four of the admirals are given charge over a section of the Fleet. Logistics is indirectly under the command of the High Admiral, who is selected whenever a High Admiral dies from the remaining four admirals (and a new one is picked to replace that post).

The admirals, despite being in charge of their fleets on paper, do almost nothing in the day-to-day _management_ of the fleets themselves. Instead, they provide guidance, goals, and handle interactions between the fleets, or between quarians and the Citadel or other parties. The only time they take direct control is during battle situations.

The admirals are the last word in most things (but not everything). Most of their daily routine is actually spent on the sort of shit our Joint Chiefs of Staff do, but admirals are also expected to be visible to the quarian people and act as an example to them.

* * *

 **Government : Heavy Fleet Command**

The bulk of the best ships, best recruits, best tech, and best gear goes to the Heavy Fleet. This is their main combat fleet, and despite the ships being old they are still nasty.

Heavy Fleet is managed by a group of ten captains who are in charge of the largest ships in the HF, battlecruisers. As life on the Heavy Fleet is the most military and regulated, there is very little for them to do in terms of governance.

Most of the captains forming the Heavy Fleet Council rarely advise their Admiral on much. The natural inclination of the quarians is to ensure their combat fleet is given everything it might need, and as such, they don't deal with some of the issues the other fleets do.

The HFC is responsible for coming up with tactics, exercises, drills, and operational schedules. They have to work with the Civilian Fleet Command to coordinate some things, and with the two Logistics Commands for supplies and recruits and all that.

The Heavy Fleet Council is a bunch of hotheads, aggressive and ready to fight. Most of them are younger than Scout or Civilian Fleet captains, and almost all of them are from the Greater Families. With the exception of the Raan and Koris Families, all the Fifteen are heavily represented in Heavy Fleet leadership.

* * *

 **Government : Scout Fleet Command**

The Scout Fleets are grouped in small bunches that usually operate independently. While the Heavy Fleet has only one real task – protect the quarians – the Scout Fleets pull a bunch of different duties – scouting, mapping, surveying, recovering salvage, and the like.

Most of the work of Scout Fleet Command is in identifying possible avenues of revenue. They interact the most with the volus and the VDF, and work closely with the Civilian Fleet to provide outlets for engineers, hackers, and mechanics to work off-Fleet for money.

The Scout Fleet also is responsible for keeping tabs on geth activity and pirates that could threaten the Fleet entire.

The Scout Fleet is managed by a fifteen-person Council – the Admiral, thirteen captains, and one Senior. The Senior is usually an aged quarian and former captain who acts as a tiebreaker vote when needed and rarely, if ever, participates otherwise.

The Scout Fleet has the most interaction (and experience) with aliens and is the only fleet an admiral tends to take a personal hand in, due to the complexity of both coordinating movements and handling logistics and medical care. Most of the time, the Raan Family ends up making up a majority of the captains.

Scout Fleet Council captains are cautious in terms of military action, but not afraid to use their guns when it comes down to it. They are more open and less confrontational than other quarians, and it's rare any Scout Fleet-types go into exile.

* * *

 **Government : Civilian Fleet Command**

So, like, if you suck so badly you can't get into the other two fleets, you end up here. The Civilian Fleet contains the three big Liveships, hospital and medical ships, food conversion ships, factory ships, mining ships, and transport tugs. A bunch of obsolete ships turned into floating residential habitats used to make up most of it, but that's been recycled now.

The Civilian Fleet has a group called the 'Unified Oversight,' which is a collection of fifty captains elected every six months by everyone in the Civilian Fleet. The Admiral of the Civilian Fleet also takes part in this, but at somewhat of a remove.

Civilian Fleet issues are always messy, with them getting the least resources and having the heaviest responsibilities and loads to bear. The Civilian Fleet also has to work with all the other fleets to provide resources and additional personnel as needed.

The Koris Family is the only one of the Fifteen who is associated with the civvies. Despite the stigma you'd think they'd get, most other quarians admire the Koris. They could be nose-in-the-air like the rest of the bigshots, but they quietly take positions of leadership and try very hard to encourage silver-ranks to retest and show their worth.

The shape of their ships is pitiful, and most of the fleet was broken up to serve as materials for buildings on the colony. The remaining ships are mostly restricted to the space around their colony for now.

* * *

 **Government : Science Fleet Command**

The smallest of the commands, the Science Fleet is mostly comprised of smaller, newer ships used to perform research and development for weapons, ship systems, infowar systems, and cybernetics.

It's managed almost solely by the Admiral, five captains, and five Lead Researchers. The group basically focuses on what to investigate and how best to invest their efforts back into the Fleet as a whole.

The Admiral of the Science Fleet is rarely one of the Families, as it's seen as a peripheral role. That being said, the Admiral has an outsized voice in what gets spent, as it is the Science Fleet that kept the Fleet in one piece for centuries.

It's not really easy to find out much more about it, since there's no exiles from the Science Fleet. The exiles I spoke with have heard rumors that such exiles are killed in 'accidents.' Wouldn't surprise me.

* * *

 **Government : Fleet Logistics**

The Logistics of the entire Fleet is run by a conclave of twenty-three captains from all the fleets combined. In effect, everything quarian is owned communally. Personal property – outside of your suit, your life-support equipment, and personal knickknacks – is owned by everyone.

Food, supplies, weapons, armor plates, infowar programs, precious metals, everything.

Each quarian is given a Logistics Code, which is a complex measurement of the quarian's place in society, basically. It's a combination of your color rank, aptitude, ship, fleet, skills, intellect, and other stuff – and it determines what you get and how much.

Someone with a high Logistics Code can get more food, better quarters, better equipment, more access to VR and clean rooms, better medical care, better schooling for their kids, etc. etc. etc. Of course, the higher Logistics Codes mostly go to quarians in the Heavy and Science Fleets, then Scout, and whatever is leftover gets to the Civilians.

You'd _think_ this would lead to inequality. But the cuties aren't really selfish assholes. The difference between an old-school blue captain of the Fifteen Families in the Heavy Fleet and a down-and-out waste processor on some broken-down scow in the Civilian Fleet isn't much. A few hundred calories a week of food. Maybe two square meters more living space. Maybe an extra hour a month in the VR rooms.

I hate these guys. There's no corruption anywhere. Ugh.

Fleet Logistics also has to deal with economic trades from outside the Fleet. They're about the only quarians who have experience with the volus outside the Scout Fleet, and a few of 'em have even been on Earth.

* * *

 **Government : Crèche Logistics**

Ah, the creepy ones.

So, you know how I said quarians have big families and the girls like to get it on? Problem with that is doing the dirty means taking off the suit, and you can only do that in a clean room.

Which are very tightly controlled in terms of access. Even the farking admirals don't have personal clean rooms.

Crèche Logistics is a group of fifteen random, computer-chosen captains who do examinations and approvals of quarians in the Fleet to have kids.

They review the files blind – there's no identifying information on them, only their skills, color rank, and genetic information. To even get your file to the bosses is done by a monthly lottery that quarians enter if they've proven themselves to their Captain.

* * *

 **Government : the Conclave**

I said earlier the quarians don't have a democracy. That's… kinda true and kinda not.

In very rare events, the Admiralty decides an issue is so important that it has to be opened up for discussion. These events are called 'Conclave Callings.'

There are two types of Conclaves. The Lower Conclave consists of the Admirals getting votes from every captain, retired captain, and retired admiral (if any) in all the fleets. Typical reasons for Lower Conclaves have been things like extending a permanent residence on Vol Prime for quarian engineers and mechanics working for the VDF to stay, entering into a long-term patrol mission for the Citadel Council to observe pre-sapient lifeforms, and every case where an entire ship is exiled.

For truly monumental events, the Lower Conclave can vote to call the Higher Conclave – which is a vote from every single adult, non-exiled quarian. The only time the Higher Conclave has been called in recent history was the decision to accept a seat on the Citadel Council.

The Admiralty doesn't like calling Conclaves, as they are both a break in authority and a mess to administer. They mostly do it when there's a lot of disagreement in both the Admiralty and Fleet Commands over a particular issue.

All the voting is done using the quarian intranet, overseen by what exiles tell me are probably some kind of redbox AI mock-ups of long dead admirals from the past. Creepy.

* * *

 **Government : the Last Walk**

When a quarian gets too old to do much work, they have two choices. The first is retirement, which puts them into the Civilian Fleet, training and teaching young quarians and writing up their skills or histories for future generations.

Some quarians are considered too valuable to simply lose. Assuming the Admiralty approves it, these quarians can choose something called the 'Last Walk,' which is them having their brains destructively scanned to produce a redbox AI representation of the quarian in question.

Extremely strict laws prevent this redbox from holding full citizenship rights. They can't be placed into any mobile platform or given any form of extranet access. For the most part, the Last Walkers provide advice and guidance to the Admiralty until they lose coherence and go rampant or enter into something the exiles we talked to called the 'Fugue.'

There hasn't been a lot of research done on the effects of redboxes on sapient beings, aside from the fact that most people crammed into one go rampant and ka-razy after five or six years. Being able to manifest in full-contact, full-immersion VR suits helps lengthen this time, but after a decade or so most of the ones who haven't gone cuckoo simply stop responding.

If asked, they say they're contemplating something, or are busy thinking on a problem. Most of them are completely nonresponsive after fifteen years.

Rarely, something happens that makes some of them wake up again, at least for a week or two, and then they go back to being in the Fugue.

The quarians don't really bother to keep the existence of these redboxes a secret. One of the big sticking points in joining the Citadel Council was adhering to the 'Polity of Zero,' the Citadel restriction on all forms of unsupervised AI research.

Of course, the whole EDI project thing the SA was working on with Council approval gave them a slight in. Right now, the legal status of the redboxes are pretty murky and no quarians are given approval for a Last Walk until it's cleared up.


	17. Chapter 17 : Quarian Military

**A/N:** _Did some more work on TWCD next chapter, up to 10k words. Writing has slowed down a lot. Soon, we can get working on the krogan, though, which should be fun as I'm not doing most of the history, biology, or cultural pieces._

* * *

 **The Cerberus Files : Outcast Races**

* * *

 **Message Header: HELNET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **NEGOTIATING ARBITRAGE HEADERS…CLEAR**

 **SYSFILL 845277-SUB-ELEVEN:** _Cross check complete_

 **DOLOS-FOUR-TWO-ZERO :: BROOKS-420**

 **CREATING HANDSHAKE…ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

 **BEGIN TRANSMISSION: BROOKS**

* * *

Boss, we're on Riga-III. Well, I'm on Riga-III and you said Trellani is on her way. Rasa is still on the shuttle headed to Minuteman. I'm guessing I'm supposed to wait here for the Comedy Twins to show up, right?

I hope they hurry. Riga-III is a mining colony often used by the quarian navy to resupply bulk minerals used in repairs – molybdenum, niobium, aluminum, etc. They trade engineering repair teams to maintain the mining rigs for free to pay for it. The whole place is a rundown, poorly held together mess of old hab-domes, shitty freighters crammed together with omni-gel and bailing wire, and a colony 'tower' that's half of an old He-3 tanker converted to living space. The air recyclers are beyond shot and the smell is like month-old gym socks in a bag of rotting meat left out in the sun.

And I thought Caleston was a shithole. Anyway, used the time to finish up the military piece. I think Trellani had already done up a section on important quarians, and I don't have any notes on that, so she can finish it out.

The Migrant Fleet is a military structure, but making sense of the quarian military in a way that matches up with other races is kinda hard. Even the turians have some stuff with no military applications, but the quarians don't. I mean, they have the Civilian Fleet and all that, but even that fleet has militia, guard warships, etc.

And despite how bad a condition those ships are in, if it goes down to the wire they're fully prepared to use even the Civilian Fleet as a warfighting asset. That's pretty hardcore. Then again, until recently they had nowhere to fall back to. They lived for centuries on the edge of extinction with their backs against a wall of vacuum… they're not soft, no matter how polite and cute they act.

Meh, this is going to be kinda dry and boring. Just so you know.

 **Cerberus Thought of the Day:** _War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over._

* * *

 **Quarian Military Generalities and Mindset**

The quarians aren't like most other races in that you can pin them down to a set of tactics and reactions. They have different approaches for the different fleets, but on top of that, each piece of the quarian military has its own specific uses. They don't have unified strategies and not only does each fleet have its own flavors of maneuvers and tactics, they often throw out what works to try new things and see how it goes.

You can kinda sum it all up by saying they're heavy on defensive fighting, mobility, and the power of their infowar and Techmarines, but even that varies. Some Marine commanders favor rapid hit-and-run stuff, others go for digging in heavily, still others use complicated flanking from drones and infowar crap to drive enemies back.

What tactics they do stick to are mostly highly flexible concepts. They can be recombined on the fly for new stuff, or meticulously go against what they were designed to do just to throw an enemy off. They have fought geth for centuries and know more about fighting and killing them than anyone, but they've also had to fight pirates, slavers, mercs, and the occasional group of raiders.

Their ground forces are more like space Marines, and their actual space combat teams are more prepared for deep space combat and environmental failures than any other race. One-on-one in an open field with traditional conditions, they aren't the best, but when it comes to boarding and things of that nature – or heavy urban combat – they're a lot nastier than even trained turian troops. It doesn't really help that even their basic soldiers have drones and better infowar stuff than most of the SA's combat engineers.

I know people like kicking them around, but despite their heavy losses, when you look at damage in a percentage of fleets lost, the quarians came out better than anyone else at the Battle of the Citadel. While they aren't geniuses in combat or anything, they can take a hell of a beating and they handle damage control better than anyone else.

In terms of fighting in space, they're pretty good at it. On the ground… meh.

Quarians don't like melee in most cases, and when they're forced into it they tend to get vicious about it. They are good cover fighters and close in ambushers, decent marksmen, and crappy assaulters. None of that matters, though, since even their grunt infantry is a match for most of our infowar specialists, and their idea of an infowar specialist gives even General Grumpypants nightmares.

* * *

 **Quarian Military Doctrine : Ground**

Um. Well, see, that's the thing… they really don't have a ground doctrine?

Let me explain.

Quarian military planners see any kind of non-spaceship combat as a sign that someone didn't do their job properly in most cases. And I can see why. I mean, how badly do you have to fuck up in order to get your ass shot at when you go around trying not to stir up trouble? Aside from combat boarding operations, quarians involved in firefights are usually reacting to something.

So most of their doctrines are defensive. Quarians defer to a bunker mentality and prefer any ground fight to be one of them in cover, sniping and using drone swarms to get an enemy cut up and bleeding. Only after they have taken off the enemy's edge do they slowly move in, leading with heavy elements, explosives, and hacking of enemy systems to weaken them further.

They do well in that kind of fight. In situations where they are forced into reckless advancing or their defensive setups are broken, they tend to get killed a lot. They aren't built to take damage and some of them can die from a simple suit breach causing a cascading allergic failure. They can handle hit-and-run stuff if they have place to run to, but they're the worst at any kind of guerrilla warfighting.

Quarians are almost as stubborn and brave as turians. While not completely impossible to break, their resolve only gets greater the more risk the rest of the Fleet is in. Boarding quarian ships is suicide, they'd literally rather blow the ship up around them than allow you to take it from them.

* * *

 **Quarian Military Doctrine : Space**

Quarian fleet tactics, like I said, vary wildly based on the fleet, the commanding officers, and the size of the force. In general, however, quarians never use attritional tactics and mostly rely on maneuver warfare, hacking, and crossfire.

Quarian ships are going to be able to take more damage than most due to damage control systems and really good engineers, but most of them are not new and some are more vulnerable to internal fires and electrical failures. Armor, especially on the lighter ships with weaker engines, is too light to stop heavy mass accelerator fire, and none of the ships except the Heavy Fleet have fully up-to-date ECM systems. Like batarian ships, quarians can't always afford optronics, so a _BIG_ portion of the Civilian and Science Fleets is very vulnerable to EMP and is helpless for a while after long FTL transits.

Given the very small size of the quarian industrial base, they prefer the use of mass accelerators to torpedoes, missiles, or other ammunition based delivery systems (although they use a few, like the volus torpedo boats). Quarian ships are unique in having almost all their weapons set in turrets rather than centerline. While this means they don't have truly huge calibers, it also means even smaller ships have much heavier firepower in the middle calibers, and they have three hundred sixty degree fire arcs, making maneuver warfare against them almost impossible to pull off.

* * *

 **Quarian Military Doctrine : Ship Design**

Ha!

Quarians have only a handful of ships they built themselves: Liveships, the C4I ships, and the command cruisers. Well, also a few hundred bulk transports that are used mostly for recycling. Most of the rest of their Fleet is older ships from other races, civilian freighter conversions, or purpose built ships produced for them at cost.

Quarians usually retool the outside of these ships with an armor and electrical systems kit that include hull overlays. Quarians like longer, thin ships and their command-and-control add-ons are a vertical circular thingy at the front of the ships.

About half the Fleet is of turian design, a third salarian, and the rest is mixed conversions, a few asari junkers, and some volus missile frigates. You'll see lots of mods to all of these ship types, including armor strap-ons, engine upgrades, tacked on turret systems, etc. For the non-military ships though, this won't add much durability, although they won't come apart like a dropped egg when hit once or twice by raiders.

* * *

 **Quarian Military Organization : Boarding Protocol**

When it comes to boarding operations, most people think of batarians – who are pretty good at it. They're tough, hard to kill, and good in melee. They have nasty crap designed specifically for boarding like KRITHs and AUGMEKs and they handle zero-g pretty good.

Batarians ain't got shit on a quarian boarding party.

The Fleet Marines are trained in zero-g fighting every day, and they use weapons that incorporate electro-plasma. Not only can this jump from target to target, it really is a nasty weapon close in. It fucks up electronics, surges optronics, kills geth, cyborgs, mechs, and does a number on every race's nervous system except volus. The superheavy stuff, the lightning guns? Bang dead. In open areas their weapons aren't as effective, but in the tight corridors of a ship there's no way to dodge – and cover is almost always metallic and thus, totally fucking useless.

When the QFM board a target they use a specialist protocol. Demo teams lead the way; younger Marines specialized in omni-fab explosives, grenades, detpaks, and scouting drones. Following them up are 'gunmen,' medium infantry with marksman rifles who pin down approaching targets while the demo teams blow holes in the ship's infrastructure.

Behind the gunmen are the infowar specs, quarian combat hackers who use drone swarms to tie up enemies and are adept at fucking with life-support, atmo, and gravity settings on almost all ships. (Stupidly, most races don't put heavy defenses around in-ship life control VIs – something we should look into ASAP.)

Finally, in the rear, is a passel of Techmarines and Heavy Marines. They go through the enemy directly to take out engineering and the bridge of a ship, with the Heavy Marines laying down enough firepower to kill krogan easily.

This protocol doesn't work very well in any other kind of combat, but on ships it's a nightmare. You can't focus on stopping the boarders directly because demo teams are sabotaging all the fucking things, the hackers are making your medi-gel into acid and having your atmo generator spray chlorine gas, and the gunmen are flinging grenades with toxins everywhere.

The suits mean they can kill life-support for a ship they're boarding with no real consequences to them. It takes, on average, a skilled crew between five and seven minutes to get into survival suits after a boarding alarm.

Quarians can hack into life-support in as little as forty seconds. It's pretty ugly.

* * *

 **Quarian Military Ranks**

The quarians have a trio of ranking systems, basically. There's one for the Fleet Marines, one for the Ship Crews, and one for basically everyone else. But the names and titles are identical, so it doesn't really matter. All of these are carry-ons from the old ranks they had before the Geth War, but over time some of the names changed a bit.

There are four ranks of what we could consider 'enlisted,' but with quarians it basically means you haven't picked a specialty. If you end up in the Scout or Heavy Fleets, there's six lower and six upper or officer ranks, topping out at 'Captain.'

The ranks in the Civilian Fleet are mostly the same, but have a modifier on the end of the name that means it is civilian in nature.

Like I said, the ranks are all the same.

 _Applicant, Tested, Proven, Junior Crew, Crew, and Senior Crew_ are the six basic lower ranks.

 _Master, Elder, Lieutenant, Commander, Vice-Captain, and Captain_ are the six upper ranks.

 _Aspirant, Student, Dedicate, and Prepared_ are the four 'enlisted' non-specialist ranks.

Admiral is a rank, but not one you can get promoted to, only chosen for.

* * *

 **Quarian Military Units : Ground Forces**

The cuties don't mess around when it comes to throwing down. Their Fleet Marines make up the bulk of things, but that's not all that exists.

 _Fleet Marine Assault Unit:_ The basic QFM unit. Most of them have black-and-red suits and heavier weapons. The Fleet Marines in these units are the ones who do most of the fighting with geth and the defense of noncritical ships.

 _Admiralty Marine Garrison Unit:_ Answering directly to an admiral, each fleet has one of these, made up of highly trained veteran Marines that protect the core assets of each fleet. For example, the Civilian Fleet Admiralty Marines guard the Liveships, while the Heavy Fleet ones protect the quarian command flagship and the hospital support ships.

 _Admiralty Guard:_ The toughest of the normal Marines, these are like a mix of bodyguard and STG team for the Admiralty as a whole. They don't answer to any one admiral, and they are dedicated mostly to protection of the chain of command.

 _Techniguard Elite Unit:_ All the infowar hackers, demo-types, and Tech and Heavy Marines are part of these units, mostly so that the engineers can do all the maintenance for each at one time. Almost never deployed directly as a fighting unit, the Techniguard is, I suppose, kind of like the Solguard as a last line of defense.

* * *

 **Quarian Military Classes**

 _Fleet Adjutant:_ So, for the most part, the Civilian Fleet is just that, civilians. But even they get picked on sometimes, and in big raids in the past, some of them got boarded. Adjutants are considered what we would call militia – usually young adults, given a bit of military training and a light weapon, led by older, retired Fleet Marines who didn't go the way of Heavy Marines. They use the Rielka pistol, mostly.

 _Fleet Marine:_ The bulk of the quarian military. Trained Marines (usually five to six years before they're considered 'ready' for combat), these guys and gals see themselves as the protectors of their race. High morale, good discipline, and great teamwork. Most fleet Marines carry one of three loadouts – a Reegar shotgun and a Rielka pistol, a Shotan heavy repeater and a shock rifle, or a pair of Shotans and a grenade belt. Heavy weapons teams sometimes carry a Reegar Arc Projector they can field – mount on an omni-gel constructed pintle tripod.

 _Marine Exemplar:_ Senior Marines, these are the equivalent of our sergeants and chiefs. They usually get heavier armor upgrades and stronger shielding than the base Marines, and most of them use the Adas rifle. Exemplars also double as field medics.

 _Marine Captain:_ Marine groups are broken into tielta, or 'squads' roughly. A captain heads up each fifteen-person squad, and aside from being in command and having a Koris marksman rifle, is basically the same as an Exemplar. Quarian captains wear a gold trim on their reik to identify them, so they should be a primary target to take out if we go hot with them.

 _Techmarine:_ The Techmarines are quarian combat engineering specialists, wearing power-augmented suits and equipped with lots of cybernetic toys. They're the ones running the drone swarms and the hacking subroutines while the rest of the quarians are shooting you to pieces. Techmarines use light weapons, but their main weapons are drones and explosives.

 _Heavy Marine:_ The heavies in any quarian outfit, these are some serious badasses. Mostly older quarian Marines shot to pieces by geth over the years, who are given a cybermakeover and have an upgraded suit more like heavy battle armor or even a light mech. They have multiple weapon systems, segmented armor, omni-armor out the wazoo, drones, missiles, and a giant, fuck-all plasmathrower. Heavy Marines dropped on the Citadel during the Benezia Incident, and so they can do zero-g and atmo drops on top of everything else. There's lots of video of them getting medieval on a bunch of geth – unlike most quarians, these boys loved to get up close and pick up a geth and smash it into the ground.

* * *

 **Quarian Support Units**

Quarians don't really have support units (or vehicles) in the way we would see them. I mean, they have a civilian class of 'repair engineer' who has a bit of training in how to handle a fight, but the idea of having units not in the fight (aside from the Techmarines, who are more than happy to stomp you into a mudhole if you make them) is weird to them.

The closest thing you can get to support is field medics – civilians, loaded down with isolation suits (a big baggy thing you shove an entire quarian in) that they flood with powerful antibiotics and medi-gel to deal with suit breaches. These are usually backed up by adjutant militia and regular civvies to haul the injured away, but you only really see this in cases where a bigger quarian ship gets boarded.

* * *

 **Quarian Warship Classes**

Wooboy, this is going to be tricky.

Quarians haven't really custom-built ships to their own spec in three centuries. They're still building an orbital facility around their only colony to try to do that now, but for the most part, quarian ships are either converted merchant/civilian types or older model warships from other races, heavily retrofitted and altered to spec.

Only a few ships – Liveships, Scout C4I, and quarian heavy-cruisers – are of actual quarian spec and build. Most of these ships are _ancient_ – the _Rayya_ was a century old when the damned geth blew up – but are heavily modified with semi-modern equipment.

Although inexact, we can do some generalities about the fleets:

Civilian Fleet: Most ships in the civilian fleet are old, worn-out merchant ships, inefficient bulk haulers, worn-out warships too broken down to do anything with, and the occasional new ship bought, stolen, or donated by someone. Most of these ships don't have good shielding and none of them have modern ECM suites to deal with missiles or torpedoes.

 _Habship:_ The most common ship among the quarians, the habships are just old (or new) merchant ships converted to civilian purposes. Most are crewed and inhabited by four to six related families. About half of them are devoted totally to living space, about a fourth to medical areas and food production, and the last fourth to minifacturing and machining. None of these ships are designed for combat, and while they all have a single turret with a couple of light guns, that won't stop anything but very light raiders. Most of these ships are named for the quarian who brought them into the Fleet.

 _Tanker/Mega-Freighter:_ A few dozen of these ships are in the Civilian Fleet, mostly converted to dense habitation. Some of these ships are huge – the freighter _'Uressa's Gift'_ is damn near a kilometer long, nearly as big as a Liveship. Unlike smaller habships, the big ones are small cities, with tens of thousands of quarians on each one. Schooling, entertainment, and most nonindustrial production is done on these big ships. Despite being civilian in nature, most are pretty well armed and armored, and they are far too massive for anything but professional military ships to take out. There's no uniform naming convention for these, although most have been donated and are given the name of the donator as a result.

 _Light Patrol Ship:_ Older and worn-out ships too outdated to serve in the Scout or Heavy Fleets are eventually rotated to the Civilian Fleet to serve as security patrols. Most of these are more than fifty years old, and almost none of them have modern optronics or particle sensors. Depending on the type, they can have light to medium weapons loads, but without modern engines they don't have the speed or maneuverability you'd expect from light ships. They are renamed once they move to the Civilian Fleet after quarians who died protecting civilians.

 _Liveship:_ Liveships are the most massive ships ever built, dwarfing mega-freighters and even the _Destiny Ascension_. Each one is a massive ball in front of a giant pile of engines and little else. The ball is a huge biosphere, complete with artificial gravity, water, and actual dirt and wildlife (carefully curated, of course). Liveships support well over a hundred thousand quarians each, and are very old and difficult to maintain. Most have external engine pods strapped on, and external weapons, CIWS, and defense systems added. The three ships ( _Rayya_ , _Crennae_ , and _Sirah_ ) are named for cities on Rannoch that no quarian today remembers.

Scout Fleet: While not as up-to-date as the Heavy Fleet, the Scouting Fleet has much better engines, fuel efficiency, and sensors. Almost all Scouting Fleet ships are atmo-capable; most of them have dedicated medical facilities, and at least older optronics and ECM capabilities.

 _Scouting Frigate:_ Usually older turian frigates (the ones the turians replaced with their current war frigate), scouting frigates are mostly used to do recon and mapping work, finding new relay lanes or exploring uncharted systems. They have very light weapons loads and carry a couple of squads of Fleet Marines for poking around. Most are named for quarian explorers.

 _Scouting Corvette:_ Older salarian corvettes and the occasional batarian raider, these are more combat capable than the rickety frigates. One of the few ships to use missiles, they are usually retrofitted with missile racks and He-3 afterburner packs to improve their combat capabilities, but rely mainly on triple turrets to combat serious threats. The corvettes are used to deliver messages and protect Scout Fleet assets in dangerous areas. They are named after explorers who died.

 _Scouting Ranger:_ These ships are usually purpose built by salarians in return for mining operations, and are designed specifically as science vessels. Most have good scanning and detection systems and are used in stellar mapping, deep space research, and scan retrieval missions contracted by the quarians from scientists across the galaxy. They are unarmed and only lightly shielded, but are always protected by other Scout Fleet assets, and are named for quarian scientists. The entirety of the Science Fleet is also made of these ships.

 _Medium Defense Vessel:_ Older or weaker Heavy Fleet ships not quite battered enough to be thrown to the Civilian Fleet form this group of ships – older turian light-cruisers, old asari shock cruisers, and some volus missile ships here and there. While no match for modern military forces, they're more than enough to spank the asses off of pirates and most raiding groups, with an emphasis on larger guns and shields. They're named after quarian captains of note.

 _Scout C4I Command Ships:_ Only five of these ships remain the once-proud core of the old Quarian Exploration Corps. These are cruiser-level ships, with banded armor, heavy shields, and good weapons loads around a centralized lab and comm system. Capable of producing communications drones and relay-bound scanning devices, each one is in command of a section of the Scout Fleet. One such ship also serves as the Science Fleet flagship. Each one is named for long-dead Scout Fleet admirals.

Heavy Fleet: While not exactly 'new,' the Heavy Fleet is well-respected by most military forces. The ships are older, but have been carefully up-armored and retrofitted with modern optronics, GARDIAN systems, and even advanced ECM suites. Most of these ships are obtained in the Traverse by the quarians, but some groups of ships were bought legally, and the entire torpedo boat line was an 'investment' by the volus to lockdown quarian engineering assistance in the construction of Vol Prime Station.

 _Flanking Frigate:_ The weakest and lightest ships in the Heavy Fleet, these are fast salarian recon frigates, with some of the sensor gear and armor removed for more speed. They are the only ships that use mines, spraying them along flanking routes of enemy approaches and acting both as spotters for heavier ships to fire, and as deterrents to fighters or other light ships. They are named for animals on Rannoch.

 _Destroyer:_ Most of these are older asari raider-class or turian torpedo corvettes, with the guts ripped out and replaced with armor, engines, and lots of heavy turrets. The weight of guns on these ships is almost equal to what we could consider a cruiser, but they don't have the damage endurance for heavy fights, instead zipping in and out in hit-and-run attacks. They're named for quarian admirals who died in battle.

 _Torpedo Boat:_ The newest ships in the Fleet, several hundred volus _Grim Bargain_ -class torpedo ships were gifted to the Fleet – along with a stock of torpedoes and a discount purchase rate. Capable of firing a dozen M/AM torps in a few seconds, these are heavily protected ships in the Fleet and rarely exposed to battle, being saved for countering enemy dreadnoughts or battlecruisers. They are named for quarian dancers, oddly enough, no idea why.

 _Light-Cruiser:_ Almost always older turian light-cruisers with armor removed for more engine space. More lightly armed than the turian version, but less likely to come apart from a single missile burst. These are pretty common ships in the Heavy Fleet, and when they wear out, usually end up as Scout Fleet defenders.

 _Heavy-Cruiser:_ Ah, the quarian pride and joy. Most of the heavy-cruisers were either captured in combat or bought off the open market, and are a mix of batarian, turian, salarian, and a few asari ships. No matter what they started as, the quarians modify them heavily – cutting open the prow to fix a circular, armored command and control section, tearing out missile racks and such to fit ranks of chain-linked mass accelerators, and adding on engine pods to the back under thick armor.

 _Quarian Heavy Command Cruiser:_ Amusingly enough, when people think of quarian ships, this is the one they remember, even though there's only about a dozen of them in the whole Fleet. Quarian heavy command cruisers are large, nearly battlecruiser-like ships with slab-sided armored centerlines, an armored circular front, and a trio of thick pylons supporting powerful engines. The centerline is studded with a dozen heavy, triple-barrel mass accelerators and a trio of GARDIAN arrays which run the length of the ship and around the command section. Unlike most GARDIAN arrays, these can be collimated into a single tightbeam for close-range fighting, an attack that can cut through most ships easily. Quarian command cruisers have the best of everything, and are often taken out of the line of fire to undergo extensive refits for better armor, weapons, sensors, and engines. Each one is named for a past High Admiral of the quarian people.

* * *

 **Quarian Suit Augmentation**

Seeing as they depend on their suits for survival, they tend to try and make themselves a harder target however they can.

Most quarians will mount armored plating on their suits, particularly the chest, shoulders, shins, and forearms. Some will use paired kinetic barrier generators, and many of them have deployable omni-armor.

On top of that, most quarians will have an ECM drone to spoof missile attacks, and some have specialized swarms to generate omni-barriers or protective magnetic fields as proof against incoming fire or plasma.

Aside from their regular gear, Techmarines are a lot tougher than most other quarians because they have high levels of cybernetics installed.

* * *

 **Quarian Military Equipment**

Quarians don't like things that can run out of ammo, or that require lots of supplies, so it shouldn't be a shock that they don't use things like thermal clips.

All quarians weapons use a mass acceleration field to hurl either blobs of electrically charged high-energy plasma or crackling fields of ion-guided electrical bolts. These are energy hungry weapons, but they run off a mix of eezo and charge-packs, and last longer than a conventional weapon's ammo block.

Electro-plasma is good against almost everything except biotic barriers (which they rarely, if ever, encounter). Its main drawbacks are that it has a short range for the most part, it doesn't do dick against most biotic barriers, and it tends towards inaccuracy.

Since most of the cuties are lightly built, their weapons are not super bulky.

Most quarian weapons are fitted with self-destructs in multiple locations that will go off if you disassemble any part of it. A few weapons dealers will trade in these weapons, mostly guys on the Citadel who get them from stupid quarian kids selling them off for cash. Gun collectors pay big credits for these, but they're most prized by the Blood Pack, who uses them to combat the mechs you usually see groups like the Blue Suns fielding.

 _Rielka Arc Pistol:_ The most basic sidearm of the quarians, this is a nasty, heavy pistol. Related to the heavy arc projector weapon, this uses an ion laser to create a path for bolts of pure electrical energy in bursts. The reason this weapon is lethal is that the amperage of the blasts can be adjusted – and they have programmed settings on just the right amount to stop the hearts of most races. Armor is no help against this thing unless it is specially designed to ground you. It has a crappy range, doesn't fire very fast, and isn't accurate – but in a throwdown at close-range, it is almost as lethal as a shotgun.

 _Shotan Heavy Repeater:_ A bulked up pistol/SMG hybrid thing. This one uses spurts of electro-plasma, which can be charged for a big blast or sprayed wildly like an SMG. It's mostly used by the adjutant militia, kids on Pilgrimage, and the occasional engineer as a defense and standoff weapon. Good range, especially for an SMG, but not accurate at all. A single blast from the charged up shot will melt a seven and a half-centimeter hole straight through two and a half centimeters of steel, though, so don't think it's weak!

 _Reegar Carbine:_ The primary weapon of the quarian Fleet Marines, alongside the Adas and Koris, the Reegar is a nasty electro-plasma shotgun. It can spray out in a pattern, or in discrete blobs, at the flick of a switch. While the range is sucky, this thing will absolutely ruin the day of almost anything it hits. Any kind of robot, mech, geth, and most cyborgs are going down after the first hit. It can blow right through even heavy armor, and I've seen it kill a charging krogan with a headshot. The Reegar overheats rapidly, if used without a cooldown, and it's not a sturdy weapon – used to bludgeon with, will misalign the magnets or whatever the fuck is inside it.

 _Adas Shock Rifle:_ The bigger, meaner brother of the Shotan. It's a rifle – bit longer than an Avenger – with two flat, thin slot-like barrels that each unload 'discs' of electro-plasma that spin. The spin helps maintain cohesion somehow and gives it a longer range, as well as more penetration when it hits. The plasma mix is a bit meatier for the Adas, and it's a gory fucking mess when it hits something, as the recoil from the spin means some of the shit splashes on anything near the target. The range is not good for a battle rifle – about a hundred meters is the best you can get with accuracy – but you can suppress with it out to two hundred since even if you miss, the disc splatters in all directions.

 _Koris Direct-Action Marksman Rifle:_ Quarians don't really have snipers, as there's not a lot of use for them in space combat or boarding operations. What they do have are designated marksmen – usually the captains – who seek out heavy targets. The Koris rifle generates big blobs of electro-plasma hurled in grenade-like shell casings of omni-gel that rupture when they hit something. The shell casing gives it the longest range of any quarian weapon – around four hundred meters – and the size of it means it usually leaves whatever it hits totally rekt. It doesn't fire fast, and it overheats after about two shots, but since you can drop a damned heavy mech with one shot to the head, that doesn't really matter.

 _Reegar Arc Projector:_ _Definitely_ a 'heavy' weapon, this monster is about two meters long, and is designed to be wielded by the cybersuited Heavy Marine. Although most carry the Retribution instead, this one is mostly what they use in geth assaults. It's basically a giant lightning bolt gun, capable of hurling a blast of electrical energy just under a terajoule, and well in excess of a thousand amps. You get hit by that, you are going to be dust, and maybe a little water vapor. It tends to slag whatever it hits, and would probably do a number on vehicles – and completely ruin a gunship.

 _Retribution Rotary Incinerator:_ After the Reegar Carbine, this has to be the most famous weapon of the quarians. This is a monstrously big electro-plasma ejector – think of a flamethrower, but with burning, electrified plasma coming at you about two hundred kph. The Heavy Marines use this to literally burn the shit out of anything resisting – it clears cover, takes out traps, blows the shit out of electrical conduits, and basically ruins your entire day. I'm not sure what would happen if you matched a Heavy Marine with one of these up against a Shieldbreaker or Paladin, but it wouldn't be pretty!


	18. Chapter 18 : Quarian Figures of Note

**A/N:** _Quarians almost done._

* * *

 **The Cerberus Files : Outcast Races**

* * *

 **Message Header: HELNET BEGIN ENCRYPTION STRING**

 **NEGOTIATING ARBITRAGE HEADERS…CLEAR**

 **SYSFILL 493337-SUB-SIX:** _Cross check complete_

 **HERA-SIX-NINE-NINE :: TRELLANI-699**

 **CREATING HANDSHAKE… ACKNOWLEDGMENT HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED**

 **BEGIN TRANSMISSION: TRELLANI**

* * *

Beloved,

I am somewhat alarmed to hear of the violent attack on Agents Rasa and Brooks in the wake of my departure. While Brooks' tale of Rasa being recognized from using an old identity is perhaps plausible, it strikes me as unlikely she would do something so risky for no reason.

I have mentioned more than once – as have both Pellham and Kai Leng – that those two are liable to be trouble at some point. Of course, one could make the same argument regarding myself and my own issues, but I believe by now my loyalty and relative stability have been proven.

I digress. A shameful habit I seem to have acquired in the course of writing these files up. Then again, Vol Prime is not very distracting as a locale to operate from. Everything has gone successfully here, so I have some time to sort through these notes and combine them with my own observations and discussions.

You will note there are a number of people listed here. The quarians have a paucity of important figures compared to most races. While there are more figures listed here than in other Cerberus Files, the difference is that in other files the figures chosen were just a sample of the top people of import.

For this file, the quarians below are the _only_ ones of importance, period. Anyone not listed here is either hiding their value or is operating completely off the shore.

 **Cerberus Thought of the Day:** _Self-delusion is the child of fear and arrogance. Any plan that does not examine your own weaknesses is a plan for failure._

* * *

 **High Admiral Rael'Zorah gil Zorah vas _Alarei_ nar _Rayya_ :**

The 'leader' of the quarians, if such an office can be assigned to a single figure, is held by Rael. For a quarian, he is extremely large, very nearly topping two meters in height, and is an enthusiastic bodybuilder from all reports.

A being of immense skill in almost every aspect of what it means to be quarian, Rael'Zorah has a bloody history. He was involved in the Thathas Incident aboard the Citadel that ended up with a dozen killings and open fighting between C-Sec and the Broker, escaping not only with his life, but the gratitude of both the Shifter and the Shadow Broker. Returning from his Pilgrimage with a half dozen, brand new salarian ships was far beyond what anyone had done in decades, and thus his place aboard the _Alarei_ – the quarian flagship – was assured.

Since then, Rael'Zorah has risen through the ranks at a meteoric rate, although the loss of his mate has made him a hard, bitter figure. It was his decision to risk the Migrant Fleet at the Battle of the Citadel and his tactics that managed to hold the geth where the turians and asari could not, a fact not overlooked by the Citadel Council.

Rael'Zorah is well-connected to various figures across space – we know he has at least some Broker connections (even if he is loath to use them) and the ranger-class ships the Science and Scout Fleets use are constructed for him by his old friend, the Shifter. It is likely he has at least a channel of communication to Aria given the lack of Black Fleet raids against the quarians.

Politically, Rael is something of an enigma to me. His position appears to be one of forging workable solutions from the highly clashing personalities of the Admiralty, but he does not project his influence on to the Quarian Citadel Councilor, nor does he seem to focus solely on the quarian military, being mostly occupied with the logistical functions of their first colony.

A rather curiously limited outlook for the leader of a species, no?

Rael'Zorah has a single child, Tali'Zorah, who is currently one of Shepard's little band of killers. His mate is dead and most of the rest of Family Zorah is second to fifth cousins. It remains to be seen if Tali'Zorah will take her father's place, but her close attachment to Shepard makes this unlikely.

* * *

 **Admiral Han'Gerrel gil Urhan vas _Neema_ nar _Rayya_ :**

Quarians are not generally known for their militancy or aggression, but Han'Gerrel breaks the mold. Much like Rael'Zorah, he is bigger and much, much stronger than most quarians, not quite two meters tall and with imposing mass to back it up. Unlike Rael'Zorah, his muscles are from extensive melee combat practice instead of bodybuilding.

Han'Gerrel is the leading admiral of the Heavy Fleet, and commands the _Neema_ , a turian heavy-cruiser rebuilt from a wreck and upgraded with experimental weapons technology. Han'Gerrel is a power player in both quarian politics and in the Citadel Fleet, where he constantly clashes with Citadel Command over the use of Heavy Fleet assets.

Han'Gerrel has little use or trust in aliens, believing that the quarians need to stand on their own prowess and not forget that when they truly needed the Citadel, they were abandoned to their fate. He did not agree with the idea to engage the geth at the Battle of the Citadel from what we know, although he has grudgingly admitted the outcome of the fight was more than he expected from the Council.

A blunt man of little culture, he is not a diplomat or a good leader, but he is a devastating warrior and his bravery is known to many. Han'Gerrel believes deeply in the idea that power is all that the races of the galaxy respect or pay attention to, and he has worked hard over the years to improve the power of the Heavy Fleet, from respected, due to ship numbers, to honest admiration of their strike power.

His utterly reckless assault on the geth flagship during the Battle of the Citadel has won him the admiration of the turians, a fact he appears to find ironic. Calling him hot-blooded is an understatement, as he has in the past engaged in multiple boarding actions and even a base assault on a batarian slaver facility, making him one of the few quarians who can claim to have killed multiple krogan and batarians in melee combat.

Han'Gerrel has four sons, all of which are junior officers on the _Neema_ , and a single daughter currently on Pilgrimage.

* * *

 **Admiral Zaal'Koris gil Koris vas _Qwib-Qwib_ nar _Rayya_ :**

Of all the admirals, the most respected is no doubt Rael'Zorah, followed by Han'Gerrel. But the most beloved would be Zaal'Koris.

Despite his very high birth and incredible Pilgrimage (returning with a pair of supertankers and a metric ton of eezo), Zaal refused lucrative offers from the Heavy Fleet to instead take a humble posting on an old worn-out patrol ship in the Civilian Fleet. Despite ranking as a blue of the highest possible score, he scorned advantageous moves, focusing instead on refitting the ramshackle fleet homes of the civilians and working his way up to captain and eventually admiral.

Along the way, he refused to compromise, to look down on other quarians as 'lesser', to write-off the fate of 'useless' families doomed to losses due to lack of maintenance funds. He drove the civilians to find their pride, he harried the Scout Fleet to find them useful work, and he absolutely tormented the Heavy Fleet into remembering their job – not to glory themselves, but to protect the People.

It is as if Uressa T'Shora's light somehow emerged in a quarian.

Zaal'Koris is not perfect. He is often impatient and can be dismissive of people he sees as not useful in his own views. But at the same time, he is gentle, even in his dismissive nature. When disasters struck on various worlds, it was Zaal who forced the Civilian Fleet to go and provide aid, engineering assistance, and even supplies.

When two ships of the Civilian Fleet had engine failures and the rest of the Civilian Fleet was under threat by batarians, Zaal refused to retreat and fought off sixteen batarian cruisers with battered merchant ships and broken-down century-old frigates and destroyers – and did it with only a single ship lost.

If Rael'Zorah is the quarian people's endurance, and Han'Gerrel their anger, Zaal'Koris is without a doubt their soul. He is a quiet and introspective figure when not engaged in his duties, one who (alongside his brother) was the only link between the Admiralty and Citadel governance for well over forty years.

Even the most grudging of critics (namely, Sparatus) has evinced reluctant but sincere admiration for Zaal and his stances. His politics are both naïvely simple and somehow touching, as he simply refuses to compromise his morals for advantage, be that of the Fleet entire or his own.

"If you can do it the wrong way, then you can also do it the right way" is a saying attributed to him.

In the aftermath of the Battle of the Citadel (where his oddly named ship engaged in point-blank combat with a battlecruiser and _boarded it_ to deposit explosive charges), his popularity has only grown, especially among the somewhat easily impressed turians.

Older than the rest of the admirals by a decade or more, Zaal has eleven children, two of which died on Pilgrimage and two more in environmental failures, and several grandchildren.

* * *

 **Admiral Shala'Raan gil Raan vas _Tonbay_ nar _Crennae_ :**

The Admiral of the Scout Fleet, Shala'Raan is a female quarian who has a certain reputation for what can be best described as 'pragmatic generosity.' She is the sister of Rael'Zorah's deceased wife and a distant cousin through marriage to Han'Gerrel, which often makes her the mediator of clashes between the admirals.

Shala'Raan has been influential in expanding the types of work the Scout Fleet handles, stepping up the amount of scientific sensor research and telemetry gathering, and working with the Fleet Marines to work on taking out smaller raider and slaver threats, something that has only increased since the quarians began colonizing.

While normally, as I said, a person given to generosity when she can get something in return, she is somewhat more cold-blooded than her brother-in-law – willing to sacrifice trading contracts or mining contracts for long-term treaties and guarantees of security from major Citadel corporations.

Shala'Raan does not like exiling quarians, and has voted against most exiles since she became an admiral, feeling the Fleet cannot afford throwing away its best and brightest simply because they clash with 'outdated' ideals. How much of this is related to the exile of her mentor and teacher, the quarian now known as Nar'Tasi, is unclear.

Shala'Raan most often serves as a restraint to the hot-blooded Han'Gerrel, and works closely with the eccentric Daro'Xen when their goals align, but other than that, tries to stay politically neutral. She is a fan of more interaction with Citadel forces, and has sent almost a hundred quarians to train at C-Sec facilities and to apply for formal C-Sec licensing, as the Scout Fleet often serves as an ad hoc police force when it comes to outside influences (or raiders).

Shala'Raan is supposedly a great beauty by quarian standards, and her husband (a captain in the Scout Fleet) engaged in some kind of primitive traditional ritual combat to win her hand. The significance of this was supposedly high, although the exiles we spoke to did not elaborate on why, only that it was very rarely done.

She has given birth to five children, one of whom died in Pilgrimage during the Battle of the Citadel.

* * *

 **Admiral Daro'Xen gil Vatha jas _Moreh_ nar _Sirah_ :**

Unfortunately, the last of the admirals is a figure that few exiles knew much about, and our efforts at learning more have been mostly stymied. What facts we do know are not exactly encouraging, and I am reminded of Richard Williams every time I go over what I have gathered.

Daro'Xen is one of the only admirals in history to come from the civilian ranks, and her background is rather ugly, as she was captured during her Pilgrimage by batarians. When her technical prowess became useless to them she was utilized as a sex slave for the pleasure of batarian guests. This resulted in multiple episodes of systemic shock, as well as beatings and what amounted to repeated violent rapes.

Daro'Xen would have died if not rescued by a human Corsair strike team (who was there to rescue human slaves but was hardly going to leave anyone behind). They put her in an isolation suit and shot her up with turian antibiotics (taken from the batarians' loot), and then turned her over to a Scout Fleet ship.

It took her the better part of two years to recover, and she studied various subjects while she did so. Shortly after her recovery, rather than being forced to go on another Pilgrimage, she was given a placement on a ship in the Science Fleet due to her skills in math and her studies into cybernetic correction to various health conditions encountered by quarians.

Daro'Xen is a hardliner when it comes to dealing with most aliens. Not surprisingly, she is only favorable towards humanity, who she holds in the highest regard, and would like to see the batarians destroyed. Her attitudes towards other races are not much better, as she blames the Citadel for tolerating the batarians and their atrocities for centuries as the reason for her own travails.

Daro'Xen is not healthy, and has extensive cybernetic correction. She struggles with multiple mental disorders and conditions, but her iron will keeps her going, and she can often find solace when buried in research and development.

Unlike all the other admirals, Daro'Xen does not come from the Fifteen Families. She is only a seafoam in terms of her quality ranking and was never a Fleet Marine. The fact that she was chosen, despite quarian prejudice, can be attributed to a mix of her actual skill and admiration for her refusal to fall apart and give up.

In terms of intellect and ability she is one of the most skilled scientists in the galaxy, with a specific focus on high-energy distribution systems, medical cybernetics, and AI theory. She has long advocated that taking over the geth is not only possible, but a method for the quarians to define their own place in the galaxy, an attitude no one else in the Admiralty agrees with – Zaal'Koris wants to ignore the geth and focus on rebuilding the quarian people, and the other admirals want the geth destroyed.

Daro'Xen has had contact with both SA High Command and even the High Lords of Sol, as well as extensive cooperation with Alliance R&D in the past few months. It should come as no surprise that she and Admiral Synthia Vandefar get along wonderfully, as both are, in the ever amusing parlance of Pel, 'batshit crazy.'

Daro'Xen has neither mate nor children and according to rumor had a panic attack just from the idea of having to enter a clean room and unsuit (for a medical procedure, not even sex). This is a vulnerability, although how to turn it to our purposes is something I have yet to determine.

* * *

 **Captain and Citadel Councilor Thin'Koris gil Koris vas _Qwib-Qwib_ nar _Rayya_ :**

The elevation of the quarians to the Citadel Council was done with, I expect, a high degree of cynical manipulation and presumption. Given the way the admirals acted, the Council probably thought one of them – perhaps Rael'Zorah – would be named Councilor.

Instead, the most infuriatingly calm and cunning quarian the race has ever produced was given the role. I had certain dealings with Thin'Koris when I ran my own corporation, and even in his youth, the man was insufferable.

Thin'Koris is the younger brother of Zaal, and, like that one, is distressingly moral and disgustingly above mean-spirited political tricks. He considers himself an engineer of emotions and reactions, and is probably the closest thing the quarians have to a spymaster given his habit of maintaining friendly contact with many quarian exiles.

Thin'Koris is not large, has a rather reedy voice, and a tendency towards pedantic phrasing and a focus on the geth as a threat. This makes people underestimate him, while he uses their reactions to his irritating antics to analyze and categorize those he deals with.

He is not harmless. Even aside from his ability to figure people out, he was a very dangerous Fleet Marine, and he rose to captain his brother's flagship through merit alone, not family connections.

His primary focus will be survival of the quarian people, and their prosperity – but he is virulently anti-geth, not surprising given his wife and five of his children were killed in geth attacks against the Fleet.

He has one remaining child, a young daughter he is frantically teaching in hopes she can skip her Pilgrimage and be appointed as his successor.

* * *

 **Captain Grigan'Uan gil Urhan vas _Miko_ nar _Rayya_ :**

The Senior Captain of the Heavy Fleet, Grigan'Uan is probably the most feared combatant the quarians have. A tactical genius who routed most of a band of the Fist of Khar'shan during his Pilgrimage, Grigan'Uan is cool, professional, and glories in war and battle.

As Han'Gerrel ages, it is increasingly likely he will be replaced upon death or retirement by Grigan'Uan. Unlike Han'Gerrel, this Captain does not see much value in antagonizing the Citadel, and has no issues with working with alien fleets, as long as he gets to kill geth, slavers, raiders, and the like. One of the few quarians who pushes for more alien integration, he was (hardly surprisingly) a big fan of Shepard's actions in her early career against the batarians.

Grigan'Uan thinks colonizing a world when the Fleet is not strong enough to repel direct geth invasion is risky and has been noted in trying to reach out to alien fleet commanders for combined patrol assignments, in the belief that working with the Citadel and letting go of the past is more important than clinging to old slights, another difference from Han'Gerrel.

Grigan'Uan just got married recently, and has no offspring yet.

* * *

 **Captain Ven'Desiz gil Vasan vas _Iktomi_ nar _Crennae_ :**

The most daring and reckless of the Scout Fleet captains, Ven'Desiz is a thrill-seeker, explorer, and the quarian version of a rakehell.

And that is being polite about it. He's less crazed than Jakan'Vaath (see below), but not by much.

Ven'Desiz, by all accounts, had a Pilgrimage that was unlike that of other quarians – he fell in with a group of Eclipse sisters who saved his life, and he repaid them by working directly for Jona Sederis for almost a decade. He is the one who revamped many of Eclipse's weapons and was responsible for expanding their fleet of battered ships, repairing many and teaching the Sisterhood how to perform proper engineering tasks.

As he was most definitely bonded with one of the Eclipse's maidens, it is unlikely he would have ever returned to the Fleet, except for the fact that his bondmate was killed in one of the earliest geth raids prior to the Benezia Incident kicking off.

Ven'Desiz led a group of enraged Eclipse on a counterattack, culminating in a vicious space battle between the geth and a portion of the Fleet – the same attack that cost Thin'Koris most of his family. By all reports, the Fleet ships would have all been destroyed if not for the Eclipse.

Ven'Desiz led the assault personally, and managed to destroy several geth heavy-cruisers before his ship was critically hit, killing most of the Eclipse sisters he was closest to. In the aftermath, his wounds were too dangerous and complex for the limited medical capacities of the surviving Eclipse to heal, so he was given to the Scout Fleet's hospital frigate.

He recovered, and in light of his insane valor against the geth and the fact that he had a connection to the Eclipse that could be put to good use by the Fleet, was accepted into the Scout Fleet and assigned to one of the newer ships.

From the time he recovered he was relentless, recklessly volunteering for any Fleet Marine action against the geth. In the Battle of the Citadel, the ship's Captain was killed by flying shrapnel from a direct hit, and in the chaos, Ven'Desiz took command. He proceeded to destroy four geth cruisers and cripple a heavy-cruiser.

When a call for captains was announced, the entire crew of the _Iktomi_ – and several other ships – voted him to become Captain. At only twenty-eight he is the youngest captain of the Fleet in history – and his combat record since then only proves his prowess.

Despite this, he has stayed with the Scout Fleet and works hard at establishing new connections. His links to Eclipse are seen with a mixture of reactions from the quarians, but for the most part, they have accepted it, especially since Eclipse has gone semi-legal in the aftermath of the Benezia Incident. The Scout Fleet provides support and services to the CDEM over Tuchanka and has trade and exploration agreements with Eclipse.

Ven'Desiz has no real family connections and thus his habit of hooking up with various asari has not caused much friction, although it is frowned upon (both by command and young quarian females, for very different reasons). As one of the most visible and popular quarians in the public eye, he is very media savvy and his series of interviews with asari news networks have made him something of a celebrity.

Ven'Desiz is an anti-geth hardliner, even more so than Thin'Koris, and is a firm proponent of expanding the Scout Fleet's combat power.

He has no quarian children. He has a single asari daughter, the offspring of his dead bondmate, who lives on the Fleet and (amusingly) has freely chosen to seal herself in a quarian-style bodysuit. As a result, Ven'Desiz is the quarian most familiar with how to adjust non-dextro visitors and guests to the Fleet, and his ships maintain stocks of levo food.

* * *

 **Captain Tutho'Kaas gil Raan vas _Uressa's Gift_ nar _Sirah_ :**

Not all quarians are fans of the quarian ascension to Citadel Council-status. Tutho'Kaas is probably the most prominent of these, who feel the Council cannot be trusted and is an outspoken proponent of working with elements such as Aria.

His background is mostly mundane – a rather stolid Pilgrimage that netted a mining contract – but his skills at logistics and environmental systems made him a valued asset in the Civilian Fleet. He rose through the ranks slowly but steadily, and was the first to suggest the quarian people develop a deep space anchorage by combining multiple heavy tankers and the Liveships instead of having them in a vulnerable mobile state.

The Admiralty was in the process of trials to test this proposal when the Benezia Incident erupted, and the Fleet's engagement at the Battle of the Citadel altered their prospects. While most quarians were pleased by this, older captains such as Tutho'Kaas felt the quarians were likely to be betrayed by the Council in the long run.

Tutho'Kaas is one of the few quarians who interacts regularly with krogan, and his views of the Council are perhaps tinted by krogan bitterness. He is also unimpressed with the lack of resources the Council has sent towards the quarians, and has openly suggested that the Salarian Councilor has tried to sabotage certain Civilian Fleet contracts.

Most of all, though, I suspect he hates the position the quarians are in because it is the end of the Civilian Fleet. There is no need to expose the race to the dangers of rickety ships and raiders if they have a comfortable colony world to inhabit – and no way for those who fail to meet the standards of the Heavy or Scout Fleets to have any value in the eyes of the Admiralty without the Civilian Fleet.

Tutho'Kaas has worked closely with Zaal'Koris to build up quarian infrastructure and to argue for a limited continuation of the Civilian Fleet as a merchant marine of sorts. Whether this will pan out or not depends more on economic and trade conditions than anything else, but it is unlikely to work out as well as Tutho'Kaas would like.

An older quarian, he has nine children, all of whom are adults and some of which have children of their own. His mate passed away of natural causes a few years ago, and he spends almost all of his time now on Fleet affairs only.

* * *

 **Shallen'Tor var Caleston xai Heavy Fleet:**

Shallen'Tor is one of the 'Three Exiles,' famous quarian exiles that stand out as leaders in the quarian exile community. While the other two are either frightening or insane, Shallen'Tor is a quiet man who focuses mostly on teaching exiles (and the occasional Pilgrimage child) self-defense. He is in a relationship with a human woman, and is a class II Alliance citizen.

Shallen'Tor operates several businesses aside from his self-defense classes, mostly light salvage and mining consulting. He employs only humans rather than other quarian exiles, although he will put in a word to try to get an exile a job with another employer. He is almost certainly watched by the Commissariat, but – thus far – has attracted no hostile attention.

His inclusion in this list is primarily due to the fact that he has extensive contacts and contracts with the Systems Alliance military in propulsion design, even though none of his businesses work on that. He has been seen traveling to Arcturus twice to confer with Admiral Vandefar, the System Alliance head of R&D.

Shallen'Tor is unique among Exiles in that no one knows why he was exiled – and there are no hints or stories of such, either. Neither he nor the Admiralty will comment on it. Given his previous high standings as one of the senior captains of the Heavy Fleet, this is rather odd.

He raises more questions than we can answer at this time – I recommend keeping an asset on Caleston to observe him. He has adopted, with his spouse, a human child and a turian child, a rather eclectic set of children for a quarian.

* * *

 **Jakan'Vaath var Chelus IX xai Science Fleet:**

The second of the 'Three Exiles,' Jakan'Vaath is nicknamed the 'Mad,' and it is hardly a surprise this lunatic has such an appellation. Exiled from the Fleet for vicious experiments on captured raider prisoners in bionetics and nanonics, Jakan the Mad now operates an omega-level chop-shop and cybernetic clinic on Chelus. Any form of augmentation can be obtained here if one has the money to afford it, and despite being crazy, he is probably one of the leading cyberneticists in the galaxy.

Jakan'Vaath is bankrolled by Blue Suns who utilize him for augmentation of their members, but also has military contracts with the STG and C-Sec, as well as rumors that he has worked for the Spectres. Darker rumors say he is an ally of Nar'Tasi, which would hardly surprise me.

Jakan'Vaath is cold and analytical, without morals or ethics, and is less scrupulous than a salarian. (It comes as no surprise salarians find him admirable.) He has no political positions (aside from a stated distaste for associating with non-exile quarians) and only rarely leaves his labs to work on weapons projects with Delanyder on the Citadel once a year.

For a such an icy figure you would expect him to be a loner, but he is somewhat… _adventuresome_ , as he is in a long-term bond with three asari outcasts. I am not sure I even wish to learn how that came about, perhaps that is a task better given to Brooks.

Or, for amusement value, Pel.

* * *

 **Nar'Tasi var Vheska xai Scout Fleet:**

Of all the quarian exiles, Nar'Tasi is, in my mind, the most dangerous. The last and most ambitious of the 'Three Exiles,' his very name is a curse among some quarians.

I was not able to obtain many hard facts about this shadowy figure from the contacts we have made among quarian exile groups – few would even say his name. From what little I did gather, Nar'Tasi is perhaps the most rare of exiles – he was once the Admiral of the Scout Fleet.

What led him to exile is a story that seems to vary from quarian to quarian, but a few details are present in all such tales: he was negotiating with P. for some reason, and the Admiralty made a decision to stop such dealings. Nar'Tasi and his senior captains refused and were thrown out of the Fleet.

A curious tale.

Nar'Tasi literally means "I am no-one" and details of his past are likely to be inaccurate, so I do not attribute much importance to his history.

What matters in this day and age is that Nar'Tasi is the most dangerous criminal figure the quarian race has ever produced. He works hand in glove with the various Eclipse gangs that infest Vheska, and has contacts with P., Aria, and most likely the Shadow Broker. His people are all exiles, and they are believed to be the security backbone of the 'Circle of the Fallen,' the intergalactic crime syndicate formed by Aria, Jona Sederis, and the Shifter.

Nar'Tasi (or his agents) is also behind all manner of nanonic poisons, various cybernetic designs, and gruesome 'power' modifications to what are little more than killing machines, using black nano sequestration devices. More than once the Spectres have only narrowly defeated one of these monstrosities and foiled some long-term plan of his, but authorities have had about as much success finding him as they have P.

Nar'Tasi is rumored to be a cyborg of high conversion levels, one so extreme that he does not even look quarian any more, buried in a combat-suit that dwarfs a krogan. His vast wealth comes from his network of hackers and chop-shops, and his inclusion in this list stems from the fact that he is the primary supplier of various antibiotic, immune, and hormonal supplements for almost all quarian exiles.

His primary backers are probably a mix of Aria, Eclipse, and possibly elements in various turian separatist circles from what little I've gathered.

Nar'Tasi's danger is that – even among _quarians_ – he is rated as a brilliant inventor and engineer. The only reason he did not end up in the Science Fleet is his silver tongue and ability to produce deals of value with aliens. Nar'Tasi is the primary designer of the modern Retribution heavy weapon used by Heavy Marines as well as almost all of the ECM and anti-infowar systems still used by the Fleet.

It is unknown if he has offspring or a mate.

* * *

 **Golo'Mekk var Omega xai Heavy Fleet:**

I believe that Rasa made the statement that quarians could not mentally embrace the concept of traitor or separatist. While I would agree with her that no _sane_ quarian (even by their terms) could do this, I disagree that it is a complete impossibility.

Golo'Mekk proves this to a T.

This is probably the most reviled exile in history, a being who even Nar'Tasi and Jakan'Vaath refuse utterly to work with, one that even batarians regard warily. In short, Golo is the Engineer of Omega, responsible for many of the improvements to Aria's fleet and defenses.

He is also, most likely, a psychopath, wanted in connection for the destruction of the Scout Fleet ship _Urizena_ by sabotage of its engine components to result in an eezo core breach. Why he destroyed the ship has never been clarified – he fled the Fleet in a stolen vessel and transmitted his actions to the Fleet Admiralty in a transmission they have never released for public viewing.

Golo has worked to develop methods of long-term survival and other, more appalling things on behalf of batarian slavers who seek quarian slaves. He has worked with Fornax to come up with ways to enable their quarian pornography, designed drugs that work on quarian systems, and even sold various Fleet secrets to P.

Golo suffered a head wound and serious suit breach during his Pilgrimage and was never the same afterwards. The few reports I was able to gather indicate he was probably the victim of being passed over for promotion in favor of a quarian tightly allied to Family Zorah.

Golo has been a useful source of information on the Fleet – much of our gathered intel was either directly sourced from him or he provided advice on who to contact. If you did not know he was a murderer, slaver, druggist, and probably clonelegger, you would think he was a charming, erudite older quarian with a taste for alien music.

Golo is dangerous enough that he has had to stay on Omega for the past few years, as he double-crossed the Broker in some kind of deal and was targeted for multiple assassination attempts.

Given that he is the source of most of our intel, we are somewhat unable to find out more about him specifically, as he is not willing to discuss his motives or purposes.


End file.
